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People who startle easily in response to threatening images or loud sounds seem to have a biological predisposition to adopt conservative political positions on many hot-button issues, according to unusual new research published yesterday.
The finding suggests that people who are particularly sensitive to signals of visual or auditory threats also tend to adopt a more defensive stance on political issues, such as immigration, gun control, defense spending and patriotism. People who are less sensitive to potential threats, by contrast, seem predisposed to hold more liberal positions on those issues.
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Political Ideology as a Predictor for Startle Response
Graham Bettelman, et al.
University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Abstract
The authors examined the correlation in humans of ideations of political conservativism and strength of startle reactions to threat stimuli. Subjects were exposed to three situations that included a perceived threat (visual, auditory, or imagined), and their reaction measured along parameters that included the amounts of eye blinking and palm sweat, and vertical distance jumped from a sitting position. Results show conclusively that Republicans are just more jumpy.
Methods
Subjects were given questionnaires to determine political philosophy, and randomly grouped into one of three conditions (2x3 design): visual threat, auditory threat, and absence of threat. Throughout the experiment, measurements of palm moistness and blinking rate were monitored (see Fig. 1).
Visual Threat. In the visual threat condition, subjects saw a short film clip of a young gay man expressing his enthusiasm over his plans to marry the subject’s son and move to San Francisco to open a vegan swingers’ restaurant.
Auditory Threat. In the auditory threat condition, subjects were fitted with headphones, through which calming classical music was played at a moderate volume. After a randomized period of time (10s-25s after the beginning of the music), a heavily accented voice would interrupt to proclaim a desire to join the Subject’s great country in order to work a below-minimum-wage job and establish a better future for his family. The original, which design called for a variety of voices, proved too complex for this study’s simple 2x3 design, so we instead used the voice of a single Mexican-American male, aged 23.
Absence of Threat. In the absence of threat condition, subjects were instructed to imagine a utopian-type world: where wars are not waged to further political agendas; citizens are taxed fairly based on their ability to give; and all people have true freedom to worship, love, and make health decisions without government intervention.
Results
In all cases, subjects who had identified as more conservative on their questionaire reacted much more strongly to the threat stimuli, though contrary to our expectations, the greatest response came in the Absence of Threat condition. ...
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