You could be forgiven for not having browsed through the latest issue of
the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. If you care about politics,
though, you’ll find a punchline therein that is pretty extraordinary.

Behavioral and Brain Sciences employs a rather unique practice called
“Open Peer Commentary�: An article of major significance is published, a
large number of fellow scholars comment on it and then the original
author responds to all of them. The approach has many virtues, one of
which being that it lets you see where a community of scholars and
thinkers stand with respect to a controversial or provocative scientific
idea. And in the latest issue of the journal, this process reveals the
following conclusion: A large body of political scientists and political
psychologists now concur that liberals and conservatives disagree about
politics in part because they are different people at the level of
personality, psychology and even traits like physiology and genetics.

That’s a big deal. It challenges everything that we thought we knew
about politics — upending the idea that we get our beliefs solely from
our upbringing, from our friends and families, from our personal
economic interests, and calling into question the notion that in
politics, we can really change (most of us, anyway).
It is a “virtually inescapable conclusion� that the
“cognitive-motivational styles of leftists and rightists are quite
different.�

The occasion of this revelation is a paper by John Hibbing of the
University of Nebraska and his colleagues, arguing that political
conservatives have a “negativity bias,� meaning that they are
physiologically more attuned to negative (threatening, disgusting)
stimuli in their environments. (The paper can be read for free here.) In
the process, Hibbing et al. marshal a large body of evidence, including
their own experiments using eye trackers and other devices to measure
the involuntary responses of political partisans to different types of
images. One finding? That conservatives respond much more rapidly to
threatening and aversive stimuli (for instance, images of “a very large
spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a
bloody face, and an open wound with maggots in it,� as one of their
papers put it).

In other words, the conservative ideology, and especially one of its
major facets — centered on a strong military, tough law enforcement,
resistance to immigration, widespread availability of guns — would seem
well tailored for an underlying, threat-oriented biology.

Hibbing and his colleagues make an intriguing argument in their latest
paper, but what’s truly fascinating is what happened next. Twenty-six
different scholars or groups of scholars then got an opportunity to tee
off on the paper, firing off a variety of responses. But as Hibbing and
colleagues note in their final reply, out of those responses, “22 or 23
accept the general idea� of a conservative negativity bias, and simply
add commentary to aid in the process of “modifying it, expanding on it,
specifying where it does and does not work,� and so on. Only about three
scholars or groups of scholars seem to reject the idea entirely.

That’s pretty extraordinary, when you think about it. After all, one of
the teams of commenters includes New York University social psychologist
John Jost, who drew considerable political ire in 2003 when he and his
colleagues published a synthesis of existing psychological studies on
ideology, suggesting that conservatives are characterized by traits such
as a need for certainty and an intolerance of ambiguity. Now, writing in
Behavioral and Brain Sciences in response to Hibbing roughly a decade
later, Jost and fellow scholars note that…



For much mo

http://tinyurl.com/lprnuyr
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Proud to be a Liberal.