"Differences in negativity bias underlie variations in political ideology", Hibbing et al 2014 https://pdf.yt/d/KsatVxjZ_2CROOhc https://www.dropbox.com/s/q6l9ixeq5g66a0i/2014-hibbing.pdf ; excerpts:
"Disputes between those holding differing political views are ubiquitous and deep-seated, and they often follow common, recognizable lines. The supporters of tradition and stability, sometimes referred to as conservatives, do battle with the supporters of innovation and reform, sometimes referred to as liberals. Understanding the correlates of those distinct political orientations is probably a prerequisite for managing political disputes, which are a source of social conflict that can lead to frustration and even bloodshed. A rapidly growing body of empirical evidence documents a multitude of ways in which liberals and conservatives differ from each other in purviews of life with little direct connection to politics, from tastes in art to desire for closure and from disgust sensitivity to the tendency to pursue new information, but the central theme of the differences is a matter of debate. In this article, we argue that one organizing element of the many differences between liberals and conservatives is the nature of their physiological and psychological responses to features of the environment that are negative. Compared with liberals, conservatives tend to register greater physiological responses to such stimuli and also to devote more psychological resources to them. Operating from this point of departure, we suggest approaches for refining understanding of the broad relationship between political views and response to the negative. We conclude with a discussion of normative implications, stressing that identifying differences across ideological groups is not tantamount to declaring one ideology superior to another.
Folk wisdom and much scholarly research assumes political orientations are products of socialization, learned from parents and family, acquired by osmosis from sociodemographics, or conditioned exclusively by environmental situations and cultural contexts. The logic here is reasonable; authority figures encountered at impressionable early stages of life, as well as broader circumstances experienced later seem obvious sources of influence on a range of personal and social orientations including those relating to politics. Yet the effects of parental socialization on political orientations are fairly meager (bivariate correlations typically running between 0.1 and 0.3) with the exception of identification with social groups such as a political party (Jennings & Niemi 1968; Niemi & Jennings 1991).
Adding socidemographic variables such as age, education level, and family income to models of political attitudes and behavior only modestly increases explanatory horsepower (Plutzer 2002). Moreover, sociodemographic variables in and of themselves do not explain the precise factors at work in structuring preferences. In sum, political orientations do not seem to be the automatic result of parental socialization and sociodemographic circumstances. To the surprise of many (but see Merelman 1971), it is increasingly clear that Emerson’s intuition was right. Politics might not be in our souls, but it probably is in our DNA. More than 25 years ago Nicholas Martin and Lindon Eaves (Martin et al. 1986), using a standard twin design on a large sample, produced heritability estimates between 0.2 and 0.4 for attitudes on a wide variety of political issues (e.g., capital punishment, disarmament, abortion). More recent twin studies consistently confirm these findings and extend them to behaviors such as voter turnout (Alford et al. 2005; Bell et al. 2009; Bouchard & McGue 2003; Fowler et al. 2008; Hatemi et al. 2007; 2009; 2013; Klemmensen et al. 2012; Smith & Hatemi 2013). Given the many assumptions undergirding twin studies, it is important to note that alternative techniques for estimating heritability that do not rely on twins report slightly smaller but still statistically significant effects of genetics on political orientations (Benjamin et al. 2012).
Twin studies repeatedly point to a strong influence of the unshared environment and a fairly weak role of the shared environment on political orientations. Traditional research on the correlates of political temperament backs twin study conclusions, finding a weak role of the shared environment (e.g., minimal influences of parental socialization; Jennings & Niemi 1968), and efforts to identify specific environmental influences other than the “usual suspect” sociodemographics (age, education, gender, and the like) have met with at best mixed success.
It is well-known that on the average people respond and pay more attention to negative than to positive stimuli (Baumeister et al. 2001). Our interest, however, is in individual variation around the “average.” Certain individuals respond strongly and attend concertedly to negative stimuli; others less strongly. We reason that this variation is likely to correlate with the political positions endorsed by each individual.
Hypothesizing a connection between political orientations and psychological/physiological responses is encouraged by the intraperson longitudinal stability of each. Political scientists have documented the role of unspecified long-term forces in structuring political orientations and decisions, referring to them, alternatively, as antecedent conditions (Marcus et al. 1995), long-term predispositions (Zaller 1992), or ingrained habits (Gerber et al. 2003; Plutzer 2002). A recent study even notes that when it comes to an interest in politics, “you’ve either got it or you don’t” (Prior 2010; see also Alwin & Krosnick 1991; Sears & Funk 1999). For their part, psychological and physiological response sets are also relatively stable over time (Cohen & Hamrick 2003; de Weerth & van Geert 2002; Huizenga et al. 1998; Lykken 1999) and therefore – in theory at least – could help to explain the longitudinal stability of political orientations.
Considerable evidence suggests that liberals and conservatives are distinct on a wide variety of psychological and physiological variables. In the main sections of this article, we summarize that evidence and argue that a surprising amount of it can be integrated around the theme of differences in physiological and psychological responses to negative events and stimuli.
People sitting in a messy, malodorous room tend to make harsher moral judgments than those who are in a neutral room (Schnall et al. 2008), and disgusting ambient odors decrease approval of gays (Inbar et al. 2009b; see also Inbar et al. 2009a; 2012a). Sitting on a hard, uncomfortable chair leads to less flexible attitudes than those offered when sitting on something soft and comfortable (Ackerman et al. 2010). People reminded of physical cleansing – for example, by the presence of hand sanitizer – render sterner judgments than those who are not given such a reminder (Helzer & Pizarro 2011).
Moral judgments can change as a result of hypnotic suggestion (Wheatley & Haidt 2005), and prompting analytical thinking lowers religiosity (Gervais & Norenzayan 2012). Focusing exclusively on political variables, when churches are employed as polling places people’s tendency to cast votes for right-of-center candidates and ballot propositions increases compared with when public schools serve as polling places (Berger et al. 2008; Rutchick 2010). Mortality prompts – images of tombstones, hospitals, and the elderly – foster the adoption of conservative political positions (Jost et al. 2004; Landau et al. 2004; although see Castano et al. 2011). Italians who implicitly associated symbols of the United States with negative concepts were more likely to vote against the proposed expansion of a U.S. military base even though they believed themselves undecided on this issue (Galdi et al. 2008).
In a series of studies following the lead of Zajonc (1980), political scientist Milt Lodge and his colleagues demonstrated the importance of hot cognition or automaticity in political judgments (Lodge & Hamill 1986; Lodge & Taber 2005). Political stimuli often produce extremely quick emotional reactions that affect more deliberate cognitive processes such as memory recall, attention, and information processing. In one study, images of a happy face flashed for too short a time to register in conscious awareness resulted in participants offering fewer reasons to oppose immigration (Lodge & Taber 2013), indicating that quick, preconscious responses color political judgments. These concepts receive extensive development in the work of psychologist John T. Jost and colleagues. Jost refers to preconscious biases as motivated social cognition and repeatedly demonstrates that people do not come into political situations unconstrained (Carney et al. 2008; Jost 2006; Jost & Amodio 2012; Jost et al. 2003). These constraints typically operate outside of conscious awareness though people often insist that their political decisions are solely the result of conscious considerations.
Mass-scale political preferences systematically correlate with an astonishing variety of psychological characteristics. Perhaps the best known is authoritarianism. The Authoritarian Personality, by Adorno et al. (1950), claimed that characteristics such as conventionalism, submission to authority and anti-intellectualism clustered into a distinct, measurable personality trait, and developed the F-scale to measure that trait. Variation on this scale correlated with a wide range of political attitudes, including self-placement on a liberal-conservative dimension. Similarly, McCloskey (1958) concluded that traits such as confidence, social behavior, mood, cognitive complexity, social behavior, and preferred leadership styles also distinguished liberals and conservatives. Since then, some research explicitly rolls politics into personality, whereas other research treats politics as conceptually distinct from personality. A prominent example of the former is Altemeyer’s development of a scale to measure Right-Wing Authoritarianism or RWA (Altemeyer 1981; 1996). To illustrate, one RWA item asks whether respondents agree that “God’s laws about abortion, pornography, and marriage must be strictly followed before it is too late, and those who break them must be strongly punished.” Altemeyer’s blending of life and political tendencies to capture a personality trait of broad social relevance is part of a pattern in post-Adorno research. Wilson and Patterson (1968) measure conservatism by combining explicitly political stands on issues such as school prayer and the death penalty with preferences on broader lifestyle issues such as modern art and pajama parties (see also Wilson 1973). Bouchard urges combining religion, politics, and authoritarianism into a single concept (2009). Tomkins (1963) and Tetlock and Mitchell (1993) also conflate personality and politics. Others, however, go out of their way to tap authoritarian tendencies without explicitly invoking politics – for example, by measuring nonpolitical authoritarianism with survey items on child rearing (Feldman & Stenner 1997; Hetherington & Weiler 2009; Stenner 2005). Those who favor more authoritarian parenting styles are significantly more likely to be political conservatives. Another longstanding concept merging politics and personality is Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) (Pratto et al. 1994; Sidanius & Pratto 2001) which is based on the observation that people vary in their comfort levels with group-based discrimination and dominance, with some embracing the vision of a hierarchy of groups.
Though Big Five personality batteries are not overtly political, two traits consistently discriminate political orientation across a broad range of studies: Conservatives tend to score higher on conscientiousness and liberals tend to score higher on openness to new experiences (see Caprara et al. 1999; Gerber et al. 2010; Mondak & Halperin 2008; Rentfrow et al. 2009). Other Big Five traits do not correlate as consistently with political orientations but extraversion and emotional stability have been associated with economic (though not social) conservatism (Gerber et al. 2010; Young 2009) and elements of agreeableness have also been linked to ideology, with conservatives being more polite and liberals more empathetic (Hirsh et al. 2010).
For example, consistent with their tendency to report being more conscientious, conservatives’ “life spaces” tend to have more cleaning supplies and organizing elements, including calendars, postage stamps, and laundry baskets, and, consistent with their penchant for new experiences, liberals tend to have more art supplies, travel materials, and greater varieties of books and music (Carney et al. 2008).
Personality traits are far from the only psychological characteristics that discriminate political orientations. Shalom Schwartz’s research focuses on the values that guide an individual’s personal life, such as conformity, tradition, security, power, achievement, hedonism, stimulation, selfdirection, universalism, and benevolence (Schwartz 1992; for a good overview, see Feldman 2003). Relationships among these values are stable across cultures (Piurko et al. 2011; Schwartz 2006) and are consistently related to individual-level variation in political preferences. Conservatives tend to value security and conformity and liberals tend to value self-expression and stimulation – and those values even turn out to be powerful predictors of voting behavior (Schwartz et al. 2010).
Jonathan Haidt and colleagues demonstrate convincingly that liberals and conservatives tend to employ different considerations when making moral judgments. Liberals rely primarily on concerns for equality and harm avoidance, whereas conservatives are more likely to take into account considerations such as purity, authority, and ingroup/out-group status (Graham et al. 2009; Haidt & Graham 2007; Haidt & Joseph 2004). As was the case with personality traits and core values, these connections of moral foundations to politics apply in numerous countries (Graham et al. 2009; for additional work on the political relevance of selected moral foundations, see Petersen 2009). The connection between purity concerns and conservatism is consistent with the previously mentioned finding that conservatives tend to have more cleaning supplies in their living spaces (Carney et al. 2008). It is also consistent with the finding (replicated cross-nationally) that people with stronger self-reported disgust are more conservative (Inbar et al. 2009a; 2012b; but see Tybur et al. 2010).
Jost et al.’s (2003) extensive meta-analysis examining the core differences between the left and the right concludes that comfort with change and attitudes toward equality are the two central variables distinguishing liberals and conservatives.
Compared to liberals, conservatives are more likely to prefer simplicity and realism as opposed to complexity and abstractions in art (Wilson et al. 1973) and puns as opposed to unexpected incongruity in humor (Wilson 1990). A recently collected sample of our own shows statistically significant relationships between political conservatism and preferences for familiar as opposed to unfamiliar foods and music, for poetry that rhymes, and for novels that come to closure (Neiman 2012). This last finding is consistent with a substantial body of research investigating the relationship between political beliefs and the “need for cognitive closure.” In 1993, Kruglanski et al. introduced a battery now widely used to tap preferences for closure. It includes items such as “I do not like situations that are uncertain,” “I like to have friends who are unpredictable,” and “even after I’ve made up my mind about something, I am always eager to consider a different opinion.” Cross-nationally this battery consistently suggests individuals who desire cognitive closure tend to self-identify as conservative (Chirumbolo et al. 2004; Federico et al. 2005; Golec 2002; Golec et al. 2010; Kossowska & van Hiel 2003; Rock & JanoffBulman 2010; van Hiel et al. 2004), identify with conservative political parties (Kemmelmeier 1997), and adopt conservative positions on specific topics such as the death penalty and general punitiveness (Jost et al. 1999), immigration (Chirumbolo et al. 2004), and a variety of other social and economic topics (Golec 2002). A meta-analysis (Jost et al. 2003) reports relationships between political conservatism and desire for cognitive closure (or related concepts such as intolerance of ambiguity and preference for order) in 20 different samples in an array of countries. As both are consistent with a desire for clear and definite answers, it is not surprising that religious fundamentalism also is related to preferences for closure (Lienesch 1982). Historical and cultural context plays an important role in these relationships. In some postcommunist countries individuals with a strong preference for closure are more likely to support socialist economic arrangements (Golec 2002; see also Kossowska & van Hiel 2003). Thorisdottir et al. (2007) find that psychological preferences for traditionalism and rule-following lead to right-of-center preferences in both Eastern and Western Europe. On the other hand, preferences for security lead to right-of-center orientations in the West but left-of center orientations in the East (they also find that the effects of openness on politics are particular to region). Presumably the security and familiarity associated with a particular regime style (whatever the ideology) that long shaped people’s lives appeals to certain personality traits.
A variety of measures of directed attention are available. Common protocols such as the “Emotional Stroop,” “DotProbe,” and “Flanker” tasks find that threatening stimuli are consistently more distracting for conservatives (Carraro et al. 2011, McLean et al., in press). Negative stimuli such as angry faces appear to grab the attention of conservatives more than they do liberals. Eyetracking is an even more direct way to measure attention. Dodd et al. (2012) asked participants to “free view” collages of images (selected from the widely used IAPS collection) that had been pre-rated as positive (sunsets, happy children, cute animals) or negative (vomit, houses on fire, dangerous animals). They found conservatives spent significantly more time looking at negative images and were significantly quicker to “fixate” on those images, as well. In sum, across research methods, samples and countries, conservatives have been found to be quicker to focus on the negative, to spend longer looking at the negative, and to be more distracted by the negative.
Some evidence suggests conservatives have a lower bar for deeming stimuli and situations negative. When “emotionally ambiguous” faces are shown to research participants, individuals on the political right are more likely to report that the face is expressing a threatening or dominant emotion, such as anger. Those on the political left are more likely to “see” a subordinate emotion such as surprise (Vigil 2010). In a study of our own, a sample of 340 U.S. adults were shown a series of pre-rated IAPS images and asked to report their evaluations from favorable to unfavorable. Consistent with expectations, conservatives perceived the negative images more negatively than did liberals
Compared with liberals, conservatives tend to have stronger implicit attachments to tradition, stability, long-held values, conformity, and order (Jost et al. 2008). Young (2009) finds conservatives are more likely to be “hard categorizers” and liberals “soft categorizers,” suggesting that conservatives have a lower tolerance for ambiguity and are more likely to view the world in strongly defined categories (see also Rock & Janoff-Bulman 2010).
“BeanFest” is a computer game where participants must choose to accept or reject a series of differently shaped and marked beans. If the bean is accepted, the value of beans with that same shape and marking is revealed (it could be +10 or −10) and participants are rewarded for accumulating points. Strategies of play vary widely across people: Some “accept” many beans, risking points in order to acquire information, whereas others play it safe, accepting only those beans they know to have a positive value. One of the key correlates of variations in these strategies is political orientation. Liberals are significantly more exploratory than conservatives in that they choose far more unknown bean types even though doing so runs the risk of losing points (Shook & Fazio 2009). Differences also show up in the learning capacities of people with different political orientations. Conservatives are better than liberals at remembering which beans are “bad,” but they are also more likely to misremember the positive beans as “bad.” In short, conservatives are more likely than liberals to follow strategies that lead them to know less about positive aspects of their environment
Amodio et al. (2007) analyze conflict-related anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) activity by recording two event related potentials (ERP) for 43 participants. They employ a Go/ No-Go task where participants habituate to provide a “Go” response but then have to withhold that response (a situation known to be associated with enhanced ACC activity). Self-identified conservatives in this study made more mistakes in giving the habituated response, suggesting they are inclined toward greater persistence than liberals. Moreover, Amodio et al. find that conservative participants have significantly less conflict-related neural activity than liberals when response inhibition is necessary. This is consistent with research showing that conservatives are more likely to be conscientious and to favor cognitive closure and hard categorization. As Amodio et al. put it, “political orientation, in part, reflects individual differences in the functioning of a general mechanism related to cognitive control and self-regulation” (p. 1247; for parallel findings on individuals with strong religious convictions, see Inzlicht et al. 2009). Schreiber et al. (2013) report that during a risk-taking task, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on 54 participants reveals those who tend to vote Republican show greater amygdala activation, whereas individuals who tend to vote Democratic show greater insula activation.
Electrodermal activity (EDA) is one of the most widely employed measures of sympathetic nervous system activation (Dawson et al. 2007) and several studies report that negatively valenced visual stimuli increase electrodermal activity in conservatives more than in liberals (Dodd et al. 2012; Oxley et al. 2008; Smith et al. 2011). In some of these studies EDA response to specific image categories such as disgust correlates with specific conservative issue positions such as those related to gay marriage (Smith et al. 2011), whereas in other studies EDA response to a wide range of aversive images correlates with broad conservatism (Dodd et al. 2012). Similar research shows that physiological response to outgroup (especially ethnic) stimuli predicts attitudes and behaviors often associated with left-right conflicts on issues like affirmative action (Dambrum et al. 2003; Vanman et al. 2004). Facial electromyography (EMG) is another technique for measuring physiological response and individuals scoring high on right wing authoritarianism tend to have greater muscle activity in the corrugator region (furrowing of the brow) when viewing negative social situations (Fodor et al. 2008). Conservatives also tend to display greater blink amplitude (movement of the orbicularis occuli muscle) in response to sudden, unpleasant, and unexpected auditory prompts (Oxley et al. 2008).
As an illustration, an adult subject in one of psychologist Jerome Kagan’s longitudinal studies who was classified as “highly reactive” to novel, unfamiliar stimuli as a result of behavioral patterns detected when she was just four months old, summed up her approach to life by saying “I don’t stray from the rules too much” (quoted in Henig 2009). This is exactly the pattern we see in the personality data: Conservatives are less open to new experiences and are more conscientious. As a result, conservatives are less likely both to solicit new, potentially harmful information and to retain positive information concerning an object or perhaps a person or group (Castelli & Carraro 2011; Shook & Fazio 2009). Consequently, not only do political positions favoring defense spending, roadblocks to immigration, and harsh treatment of criminals seem naturally to mesh with heightened response to threatening stimuli but those fostering conforming unity (school children reciting the pledge of allegiance), traditional lifestyles (opposition to gay marriage), enforced personal responsibility (opposition to welfare programs and government provided healthcare), longstanding sources of authority (Biblical inerrancy; literal, unchanging interpretations of the Constitution), and clarity and closure (abstinence-only sex education; signed pledges to never raise taxes; aversion to compromise) do, as well. Heightened response to the general category of negative stimuli fits comfortably with a great many of the typical tenets of political conservatism.
Teasing out the actual causal order requires either longitudinal or experimental data. Though studies containing such data are not numerous, they do exist and all of them provide evidence that politics results from rather than causes physiological and psychological traits such as negativity biases. Longitudinal data are especially difficult to come by but two studies connect early personality tendencies to later political beliefs. Both Block and Block (2006) and Fraley et al. (2012) correlate participant observation of play and other behavior at approximately age 4 with political orientations in early adulthood. Both works conclude that childhood temperament is clearly related to adult political beliefs. For example, the Fraley et al. (2012) study asked mothers of (then) 4-year-old children to report the extent to which their child was afraid of the dark or was upset by sad movies and found, exactly as our theory on negativity biases would predict, that a factor composed of these items was strongly and positively correlated with conservative political beliefs twenty years on. Children who eventually became liberals were more likely, on the other hand to score high on “activity and restlessness.”
Evidence indicates that mortality prompts induce greater conservatism (Bonanno & Jost 2006; but see Castano et al. 2011), as do disgusting situations and stimuli (Inbar et al. 2009b; 2012b). Negative outside-the-laboratory events such as the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, have also been found to make people more conservative on several issues (Echebarria-Echabe & Fernandez-Guede 2006; Huddy & Feldman 2011; Huddy et al. 2007; Nail & McGregor 2009). Whether manipulated in the lab or the real world, these adjustments in degree of negativity precede changes in political belief and are thus consistent with our theory. Finally, evidence also suggests a positive correlation between parasite load (and perhaps perceptions of parasite load) and conservative religious and social beliefs (Fincher & Thornhill 2012).
If strong negativity biases were once selected for but now are not, it could explain why results often indicate that conservatism is in some senses better defined than liberalism. Conservatives have a negativity bias, whereas liberals do not have a positivity bias and may or may not have a negativity bias. Conservatives sometimes take umbrage at this situation, arguing that it is the result of liberal academics viewing conservatism as an aberration that needs to be explained (Will 2003). In truth, its status as a tighter, more discussed phenotype may be a result of the fact that, in contrast to proto-liberalism, proto-conservatism was once selected for.
The extent to which politics evokes controversy is puzzling. Jost and Amodio ask the pertinent question: “How is it that individuals and groups can be so strongly inspired by an abstract configuration of ideas that they are willing to sacrifice even their own lives?” (2012). Along with religion (another abstract configuration of ideas capable of affecting the lives of others), politics is the topic most able to produce conflict at family reunions and on the battlefield. People do not typically come to blows over whether it is better to be an introvert or an extravert, presumably because introverts do not have to worry that they will need to change their behavior as a result of the existence of extraverts. Politics, however, is unavoidably intrusive. The mere presence of liberals [conservatives] creates a very real possibility that conservatives [liberals] in the same polity will not be able to structure society in the fashion they most desire. This potential imposition of
values is likely one reason politics is so emotional and explosive (Brader 2006; Marcus et al. 2000; Redlawsk 2006; Sullivan & Masters 1988; Valentino et al. 2008).
it is appropriate to note in closing that citing differences in the psychological and physiological traits of liberals and conservatives is not equivalent to declaring one ideology superior to the other. Mounting empirical evidence suggests that, compared to liberals, conservatives are more responsive and attuned to negative stimuli, patterns consistent with their tendency to advocate political solutions designed to protect against threats and disorder – real or perceived. Liberals appear not to notice, respond to, or attend to negative stimuli to the same degree, a pattern consistent with their willingness to advocate political solutions that could lead society to experience new approaches to life and governing but that could also leave society more vulnerable to threats and disorder. The relative advantages of one ideology compared to the other depend upon the circumstances. If a foreign policy threat turns out to be real, the conservative response will be extremely valuable; if it is not real, the liberal approach will be better positioned to cash in on opportunities the conservative response would miss.
Moreover, being more attuned to the dangers of the world does not make for pessimistic, fearful individuals and being less attuned to dangers does not make for carefree, hedonistic individuals. In fact, conservatives are consistently found to score higher than liberals on subjective well-being, even after controlling for socioeconomic status (Vigil 2010). Apparently, being responsive and attentive to negative aspects of the environment does not lead to depressive personalities. In fact, it may be that limiting the consequences of threats is a more manageable and defined goal than is pursuing novel experiences.
Finally, just as the tendency to read value judgments into the findings summarized here should be resisted, so should the tendency to conclude the results are stronger than they are. The connection of conservative political orientations and heightened orientation to negative stimuli is surprisingly consistent across designs, studies, and countries but it is also consistently modest in effect size. Many political conservatives are not particularly responsive to negative stimuli and many political liberals are. The reported effects, however, persist even when more traditional explanatory variables, such as standard sociodemographics, are included in the models. Moreover, to provide perspective, the effects of variation in negativity bias and related concepts, though modest, typically are at least as large as many of these standard variables.
The theoretical rationale for the negativity bias is that it is more difficult to overcome a fatal (or a near-fatal) assault than to return to an opportunity unpursued, so it is more adaptive to err on the side of caution as threats get nearer. Human taste buds respond to sweet, salty, sour, and bitter stimuli. Most can detect sweetness in approximately one part in 200, saltiness in one part in 400, sourness in one in 130,000, and bitterness in one in 2,000,000."
"Disputes between those holding differing political views are ubiquitous and deep-seated, and they often follow common, recognizable lines. The supporters of tradition and stability, sometimes referred to as conservatives, do battle with the supporters of innovation and reform, sometimes referred to as liberals. Understanding the correlates of those distinct political orientations is probably a prerequisite for managing political disputes, which are a source of social conflict that can lead to frustration and even bloodshed. A rapidly growing body of empirical evidence documents a multitude of ways in which liberals and conservatives differ from each other in purviews of life with little direct connection to politics, from tastes in art to desire for closure and from disgust sensitivity to the tendency to pursue new information, but the central theme of the differences is a matter of debate. In this article, we argue that one organizing element of the many differences between liberals and conservatives is the nature of their physiological and psychological responses to features of the environment that are negative. Compared with liberals, conservatives tend to register greater physiological responses to such stimuli and also to devote more psychological resources to them. Operating from this point of departure, we suggest approaches for refining understanding of the broad relationship between political views and response to the negative. We conclude with a discussion of normative implications, stressing that identifying differences across ideological groups is not tantamount to declaring one ideology superior to another.
Folk wisdom and much scholarly research assumes political orientations are products of socialization, learned from parents and family, acquired by osmosis from sociodemographics, or conditioned exclusively by environmental situations and cultural contexts. The logic here is reasonable; authority figures encountered at impressionable early stages of life, as well as broader circumstances experienced later seem obvious sources of influence on a range of personal and social orientations including those relating to politics. Yet the effects of parental socialization on political orientations are fairly meager (bivariate correlations typically running between 0.1 and 0.3) with the exception of identification with social groups such as a political party (Jennings & Niemi 1968; Niemi & Jennings 1991).
Adding socidemographic variables such as age, education level, and family income to models of political attitudes and behavior only modestly increases explanatory horsepower (Plutzer 2002). Moreover, sociodemographic variables in and of themselves do not explain the precise factors at work in structuring preferences. In sum, political orientations do not seem to be the automatic result of parental socialization and sociodemographic circumstances. To the surprise of many (but see Merelman 1971), it is increasingly clear that Emerson’s intuition was right. Politics might not be in our souls, but it probably is in our DNA. More than 25 years ago Nicholas Martin and Lindon Eaves (Martin et al. 1986), using a standard twin design on a large sample, produced heritability estimates between 0.2 and 0.4 for attitudes on a wide variety of political issues (e.g., capital punishment, disarmament, abortion). More recent twin studies consistently confirm these findings and extend them to behaviors such as voter turnout (Alford et al. 2005; Bell et al. 2009; Bouchard & McGue 2003; Fowler et al. 2008; Hatemi et al. 2007; 2009; 2013; Klemmensen et al. 2012; Smith & Hatemi 2013). Given the many assumptions undergirding twin studies, it is important to note that alternative techniques for estimating heritability that do not rely on twins report slightly smaller but still statistically significant effects of genetics on political orientations (Benjamin et al. 2012).
Twin studies repeatedly point to a strong influence of the unshared environment and a fairly weak role of the shared environment on political orientations. Traditional research on the correlates of political temperament backs twin study conclusions, finding a weak role of the shared environment (e.g., minimal influences of parental socialization; Jennings & Niemi 1968), and efforts to identify specific environmental influences other than the “usual suspect” sociodemographics (age, education, gender, and the like) have met with at best mixed success.
It is well-known that on the average people respond and pay more attention to negative than to positive stimuli (Baumeister et al. 2001). Our interest, however, is in individual variation around the “average.” Certain individuals respond strongly and attend concertedly to negative stimuli; others less strongly. We reason that this variation is likely to correlate with the political positions endorsed by each individual.
Hypothesizing a connection between political orientations and psychological/physiological responses is encouraged by the intraperson longitudinal stability of each. Political scientists have documented the role of unspecified long-term forces in structuring political orientations and decisions, referring to them, alternatively, as antecedent conditions (Marcus et al. 1995), long-term predispositions (Zaller 1992), or ingrained habits (Gerber et al. 2003; Plutzer 2002). A recent study even notes that when it comes to an interest in politics, “you’ve either got it or you don’t” (Prior 2010; see also Alwin & Krosnick 1991; Sears & Funk 1999). For their part, psychological and physiological response sets are also relatively stable over time (Cohen & Hamrick 2003; de Weerth & van Geert 2002; Huizenga et al. 1998; Lykken 1999) and therefore – in theory at least – could help to explain the longitudinal stability of political orientations.
Considerable evidence suggests that liberals and conservatives are distinct on a wide variety of psychological and physiological variables. In the main sections of this article, we summarize that evidence and argue that a surprising amount of it can be integrated around the theme of differences in physiological and psychological responses to negative events and stimuli.
People sitting in a messy, malodorous room tend to make harsher moral judgments than those who are in a neutral room (Schnall et al. 2008), and disgusting ambient odors decrease approval of gays (Inbar et al. 2009b; see also Inbar et al. 2009a; 2012a). Sitting on a hard, uncomfortable chair leads to less flexible attitudes than those offered when sitting on something soft and comfortable (Ackerman et al. 2010). People reminded of physical cleansing – for example, by the presence of hand sanitizer – render sterner judgments than those who are not given such a reminder (Helzer & Pizarro 2011).
Moral judgments can change as a result of hypnotic suggestion (Wheatley & Haidt 2005), and prompting analytical thinking lowers religiosity (Gervais & Norenzayan 2012). Focusing exclusively on political variables, when churches are employed as polling places people’s tendency to cast votes for right-of-center candidates and ballot propositions increases compared with when public schools serve as polling places (Berger et al. 2008; Rutchick 2010). Mortality prompts – images of tombstones, hospitals, and the elderly – foster the adoption of conservative political positions (Jost et al. 2004; Landau et al. 2004; although see Castano et al. 2011). Italians who implicitly associated symbols of the United States with negative concepts were more likely to vote against the proposed expansion of a U.S. military base even though they believed themselves undecided on this issue (Galdi et al. 2008).
In a series of studies following the lead of Zajonc (1980), political scientist Milt Lodge and his colleagues demonstrated the importance of hot cognition or automaticity in political judgments (Lodge & Hamill 1986; Lodge & Taber 2005). Political stimuli often produce extremely quick emotional reactions that affect more deliberate cognitive processes such as memory recall, attention, and information processing. In one study, images of a happy face flashed for too short a time to register in conscious awareness resulted in participants offering fewer reasons to oppose immigration (Lodge & Taber 2013), indicating that quick, preconscious responses color political judgments. These concepts receive extensive development in the work of psychologist John T. Jost and colleagues. Jost refers to preconscious biases as motivated social cognition and repeatedly demonstrates that people do not come into political situations unconstrained (Carney et al. 2008; Jost 2006; Jost & Amodio 2012; Jost et al. 2003). These constraints typically operate outside of conscious awareness though people often insist that their political decisions are solely the result of conscious considerations.
Mass-scale political preferences systematically correlate with an astonishing variety of psychological characteristics. Perhaps the best known is authoritarianism. The Authoritarian Personality, by Adorno et al. (1950), claimed that characteristics such as conventionalism, submission to authority and anti-intellectualism clustered into a distinct, measurable personality trait, and developed the F-scale to measure that trait. Variation on this scale correlated with a wide range of political attitudes, including self-placement on a liberal-conservative dimension. Similarly, McCloskey (1958) concluded that traits such as confidence, social behavior, mood, cognitive complexity, social behavior, and preferred leadership styles also distinguished liberals and conservatives. Since then, some research explicitly rolls politics into personality, whereas other research treats politics as conceptually distinct from personality. A prominent example of the former is Altemeyer’s development of a scale to measure Right-Wing Authoritarianism or RWA (Altemeyer 1981; 1996). To illustrate, one RWA item asks whether respondents agree that “God’s laws about abortion, pornography, and marriage must be strictly followed before it is too late, and those who break them must be strongly punished.” Altemeyer’s blending of life and political tendencies to capture a personality trait of broad social relevance is part of a pattern in post-Adorno research. Wilson and Patterson (1968) measure conservatism by combining explicitly political stands on issues such as school prayer and the death penalty with preferences on broader lifestyle issues such as modern art and pajama parties (see also Wilson 1973). Bouchard urges combining religion, politics, and authoritarianism into a single concept (2009). Tomkins (1963) and Tetlock and Mitchell (1993) also conflate personality and politics. Others, however, go out of their way to tap authoritarian tendencies without explicitly invoking politics – for example, by measuring nonpolitical authoritarianism with survey items on child rearing (Feldman & Stenner 1997; Hetherington & Weiler 2009; Stenner 2005). Those who favor more authoritarian parenting styles are significantly more likely to be political conservatives. Another longstanding concept merging politics and personality is Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) (Pratto et al. 1994; Sidanius & Pratto 2001) which is based on the observation that people vary in their comfort levels with group-based discrimination and dominance, with some embracing the vision of a hierarchy of groups.
Though Big Five personality batteries are not overtly political, two traits consistently discriminate political orientation across a broad range of studies: Conservatives tend to score higher on conscientiousness and liberals tend to score higher on openness to new experiences (see Caprara et al. 1999; Gerber et al. 2010; Mondak & Halperin 2008; Rentfrow et al. 2009). Other Big Five traits do not correlate as consistently with political orientations but extraversion and emotional stability have been associated with economic (though not social) conservatism (Gerber et al. 2010; Young 2009) and elements of agreeableness have also been linked to ideology, with conservatives being more polite and liberals more empathetic (Hirsh et al. 2010).
For example, consistent with their tendency to report being more conscientious, conservatives’ “life spaces” tend to have more cleaning supplies and organizing elements, including calendars, postage stamps, and laundry baskets, and, consistent with their penchant for new experiences, liberals tend to have more art supplies, travel materials, and greater varieties of books and music (Carney et al. 2008).
Personality traits are far from the only psychological characteristics that discriminate political orientations. Shalom Schwartz’s research focuses on the values that guide an individual’s personal life, such as conformity, tradition, security, power, achievement, hedonism, stimulation, selfdirection, universalism, and benevolence (Schwartz 1992; for a good overview, see Feldman 2003). Relationships among these values are stable across cultures (Piurko et al. 2011; Schwartz 2006) and are consistently related to individual-level variation in political preferences. Conservatives tend to value security and conformity and liberals tend to value self-expression and stimulation – and those values even turn out to be powerful predictors of voting behavior (Schwartz et al. 2010).
Jonathan Haidt and colleagues demonstrate convincingly that liberals and conservatives tend to employ different considerations when making moral judgments. Liberals rely primarily on concerns for equality and harm avoidance, whereas conservatives are more likely to take into account considerations such as purity, authority, and ingroup/out-group status (Graham et al. 2009; Haidt & Graham 2007; Haidt & Joseph 2004). As was the case with personality traits and core values, these connections of moral foundations to politics apply in numerous countries (Graham et al. 2009; for additional work on the political relevance of selected moral foundations, see Petersen 2009). The connection between purity concerns and conservatism is consistent with the previously mentioned finding that conservatives tend to have more cleaning supplies in their living spaces (Carney et al. 2008). It is also consistent with the finding (replicated cross-nationally) that people with stronger self-reported disgust are more conservative (Inbar et al. 2009a; 2012b; but see Tybur et al. 2010).
Jost et al.’s (2003) extensive meta-analysis examining the core differences between the left and the right concludes that comfort with change and attitudes toward equality are the two central variables distinguishing liberals and conservatives.
Compared to liberals, conservatives are more likely to prefer simplicity and realism as opposed to complexity and abstractions in art (Wilson et al. 1973) and puns as opposed to unexpected incongruity in humor (Wilson 1990). A recently collected sample of our own shows statistically significant relationships between political conservatism and preferences for familiar as opposed to unfamiliar foods and music, for poetry that rhymes, and for novels that come to closure (Neiman 2012). This last finding is consistent with a substantial body of research investigating the relationship between political beliefs and the “need for cognitive closure.” In 1993, Kruglanski et al. introduced a battery now widely used to tap preferences for closure. It includes items such as “I do not like situations that are uncertain,” “I like to have friends who are unpredictable,” and “even after I’ve made up my mind about something, I am always eager to consider a different opinion.” Cross-nationally this battery consistently suggests individuals who desire cognitive closure tend to self-identify as conservative (Chirumbolo et al. 2004; Federico et al. 2005; Golec 2002; Golec et al. 2010; Kossowska & van Hiel 2003; Rock & JanoffBulman 2010; van Hiel et al. 2004), identify with conservative political parties (Kemmelmeier 1997), and adopt conservative positions on specific topics such as the death penalty and general punitiveness (Jost et al. 1999), immigration (Chirumbolo et al. 2004), and a variety of other social and economic topics (Golec 2002). A meta-analysis (Jost et al. 2003) reports relationships between political conservatism and desire for cognitive closure (or related concepts such as intolerance of ambiguity and preference for order) in 20 different samples in an array of countries. As both are consistent with a desire for clear and definite answers, it is not surprising that religious fundamentalism also is related to preferences for closure (Lienesch 1982). Historical and cultural context plays an important role in these relationships. In some postcommunist countries individuals with a strong preference for closure are more likely to support socialist economic arrangements (Golec 2002; see also Kossowska & van Hiel 2003). Thorisdottir et al. (2007) find that psychological preferences for traditionalism and rule-following lead to right-of-center preferences in both Eastern and Western Europe. On the other hand, preferences for security lead to right-of-center orientations in the West but left-of center orientations in the East (they also find that the effects of openness on politics are particular to region). Presumably the security and familiarity associated with a particular regime style (whatever the ideology) that long shaped people’s lives appeals to certain personality traits.
A variety of measures of directed attention are available. Common protocols such as the “Emotional Stroop,” “DotProbe,” and “Flanker” tasks find that threatening stimuli are consistently more distracting for conservatives (Carraro et al. 2011, McLean et al., in press). Negative stimuli such as angry faces appear to grab the attention of conservatives more than they do liberals. Eyetracking is an even more direct way to measure attention. Dodd et al. (2012) asked participants to “free view” collages of images (selected from the widely used IAPS collection) that had been pre-rated as positive (sunsets, happy children, cute animals) or negative (vomit, houses on fire, dangerous animals). They found conservatives spent significantly more time looking at negative images and were significantly quicker to “fixate” on those images, as well. In sum, across research methods, samples and countries, conservatives have been found to be quicker to focus on the negative, to spend longer looking at the negative, and to be more distracted by the negative.
Some evidence suggests conservatives have a lower bar for deeming stimuli and situations negative. When “emotionally ambiguous” faces are shown to research participants, individuals on the political right are more likely to report that the face is expressing a threatening or dominant emotion, such as anger. Those on the political left are more likely to “see” a subordinate emotion such as surprise (Vigil 2010). In a study of our own, a sample of 340 U.S. adults were shown a series of pre-rated IAPS images and asked to report their evaluations from favorable to unfavorable. Consistent with expectations, conservatives perceived the negative images more negatively than did liberals
Compared with liberals, conservatives tend to have stronger implicit attachments to tradition, stability, long-held values, conformity, and order (Jost et al. 2008). Young (2009) finds conservatives are more likely to be “hard categorizers” and liberals “soft categorizers,” suggesting that conservatives have a lower tolerance for ambiguity and are more likely to view the world in strongly defined categories (see also Rock & Janoff-Bulman 2010).
“BeanFest” is a computer game where participants must choose to accept or reject a series of differently shaped and marked beans. If the bean is accepted, the value of beans with that same shape and marking is revealed (it could be +10 or −10) and participants are rewarded for accumulating points. Strategies of play vary widely across people: Some “accept” many beans, risking points in order to acquire information, whereas others play it safe, accepting only those beans they know to have a positive value. One of the key correlates of variations in these strategies is political orientation. Liberals are significantly more exploratory than conservatives in that they choose far more unknown bean types even though doing so runs the risk of losing points (Shook & Fazio 2009). Differences also show up in the learning capacities of people with different political orientations. Conservatives are better than liberals at remembering which beans are “bad,” but they are also more likely to misremember the positive beans as “bad.” In short, conservatives are more likely than liberals to follow strategies that lead them to know less about positive aspects of their environment
Amodio et al. (2007) analyze conflict-related anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) activity by recording two event related potentials (ERP) for 43 participants. They employ a Go/ No-Go task where participants habituate to provide a “Go” response but then have to withhold that response (a situation known to be associated with enhanced ACC activity). Self-identified conservatives in this study made more mistakes in giving the habituated response, suggesting they are inclined toward greater persistence than liberals. Moreover, Amodio et al. find that conservative participants have significantly less conflict-related neural activity than liberals when response inhibition is necessary. This is consistent with research showing that conservatives are more likely to be conscientious and to favor cognitive closure and hard categorization. As Amodio et al. put it, “political orientation, in part, reflects individual differences in the functioning of a general mechanism related to cognitive control and self-regulation” (p. 1247; for parallel findings on individuals with strong religious convictions, see Inzlicht et al. 2009). Schreiber et al. (2013) report that during a risk-taking task, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on 54 participants reveals those who tend to vote Republican show greater amygdala activation, whereas individuals who tend to vote Democratic show greater insula activation.
Electrodermal activity (EDA) is one of the most widely employed measures of sympathetic nervous system activation (Dawson et al. 2007) and several studies report that negatively valenced visual stimuli increase electrodermal activity in conservatives more than in liberals (Dodd et al. 2012; Oxley et al. 2008; Smith et al. 2011). In some of these studies EDA response to specific image categories such as disgust correlates with specific conservative issue positions such as those related to gay marriage (Smith et al. 2011), whereas in other studies EDA response to a wide range of aversive images correlates with broad conservatism (Dodd et al. 2012). Similar research shows that physiological response to outgroup (especially ethnic) stimuli predicts attitudes and behaviors often associated with left-right conflicts on issues like affirmative action (Dambrum et al. 2003; Vanman et al. 2004). Facial electromyography (EMG) is another technique for measuring physiological response and individuals scoring high on right wing authoritarianism tend to have greater muscle activity in the corrugator region (furrowing of the brow) when viewing negative social situations (Fodor et al. 2008). Conservatives also tend to display greater blink amplitude (movement of the orbicularis occuli muscle) in response to sudden, unpleasant, and unexpected auditory prompts (Oxley et al. 2008).
As an illustration, an adult subject in one of psychologist Jerome Kagan’s longitudinal studies who was classified as “highly reactive” to novel, unfamiliar stimuli as a result of behavioral patterns detected when she was just four months old, summed up her approach to life by saying “I don’t stray from the rules too much” (quoted in Henig 2009). This is exactly the pattern we see in the personality data: Conservatives are less open to new experiences and are more conscientious. As a result, conservatives are less likely both to solicit new, potentially harmful information and to retain positive information concerning an object or perhaps a person or group (Castelli & Carraro 2011; Shook & Fazio 2009). Consequently, not only do political positions favoring defense spending, roadblocks to immigration, and harsh treatment of criminals seem naturally to mesh with heightened response to threatening stimuli but those fostering conforming unity (school children reciting the pledge of allegiance), traditional lifestyles (opposition to gay marriage), enforced personal responsibility (opposition to welfare programs and government provided healthcare), longstanding sources of authority (Biblical inerrancy; literal, unchanging interpretations of the Constitution), and clarity and closure (abstinence-only sex education; signed pledges to never raise taxes; aversion to compromise) do, as well. Heightened response to the general category of negative stimuli fits comfortably with a great many of the typical tenets of political conservatism.
Teasing out the actual causal order requires either longitudinal or experimental data. Though studies containing such data are not numerous, they do exist and all of them provide evidence that politics results from rather than causes physiological and psychological traits such as negativity biases. Longitudinal data are especially difficult to come by but two studies connect early personality tendencies to later political beliefs. Both Block and Block (2006) and Fraley et al. (2012) correlate participant observation of play and other behavior at approximately age 4 with political orientations in early adulthood. Both works conclude that childhood temperament is clearly related to adult political beliefs. For example, the Fraley et al. (2012) study asked mothers of (then) 4-year-old children to report the extent to which their child was afraid of the dark or was upset by sad movies and found, exactly as our theory on negativity biases would predict, that a factor composed of these items was strongly and positively correlated with conservative political beliefs twenty years on. Children who eventually became liberals were more likely, on the other hand to score high on “activity and restlessness.”
Evidence indicates that mortality prompts induce greater conservatism (Bonanno & Jost 2006; but see Castano et al. 2011), as do disgusting situations and stimuli (Inbar et al. 2009b; 2012b). Negative outside-the-laboratory events such as the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, have also been found to make people more conservative on several issues (Echebarria-Echabe & Fernandez-Guede 2006; Huddy & Feldman 2011; Huddy et al. 2007; Nail & McGregor 2009). Whether manipulated in the lab or the real world, these adjustments in degree of negativity precede changes in political belief and are thus consistent with our theory. Finally, evidence also suggests a positive correlation between parasite load (and perhaps perceptions of parasite load) and conservative religious and social beliefs (Fincher & Thornhill 2012).
If strong negativity biases were once selected for but now are not, it could explain why results often indicate that conservatism is in some senses better defined than liberalism. Conservatives have a negativity bias, whereas liberals do not have a positivity bias and may or may not have a negativity bias. Conservatives sometimes take umbrage at this situation, arguing that it is the result of liberal academics viewing conservatism as an aberration that needs to be explained (Will 2003). In truth, its status as a tighter, more discussed phenotype may be a result of the fact that, in contrast to proto-liberalism, proto-conservatism was once selected for.
The extent to which politics evokes controversy is puzzling. Jost and Amodio ask the pertinent question: “How is it that individuals and groups can be so strongly inspired by an abstract configuration of ideas that they are willing to sacrifice even their own lives?” (2012). Along with religion (another abstract configuration of ideas capable of affecting the lives of others), politics is the topic most able to produce conflict at family reunions and on the battlefield. People do not typically come to blows over whether it is better to be an introvert or an extravert, presumably because introverts do not have to worry that they will need to change their behavior as a result of the existence of extraverts. Politics, however, is unavoidably intrusive. The mere presence of liberals [conservatives] creates a very real possibility that conservatives [liberals] in the same polity will not be able to structure society in the fashion they most desire. This potential imposition of
values is likely one reason politics is so emotional and explosive (Brader 2006; Marcus et al. 2000; Redlawsk 2006; Sullivan & Masters 1988; Valentino et al. 2008).
it is appropriate to note in closing that citing differences in the psychological and physiological traits of liberals and conservatives is not equivalent to declaring one ideology superior to the other. Mounting empirical evidence suggests that, compared to liberals, conservatives are more responsive and attuned to negative stimuli, patterns consistent with their tendency to advocate political solutions designed to protect against threats and disorder – real or perceived. Liberals appear not to notice, respond to, or attend to negative stimuli to the same degree, a pattern consistent with their willingness to advocate political solutions that could lead society to experience new approaches to life and governing but that could also leave society more vulnerable to threats and disorder. The relative advantages of one ideology compared to the other depend upon the circumstances. If a foreign policy threat turns out to be real, the conservative response will be extremely valuable; if it is not real, the liberal approach will be better positioned to cash in on opportunities the conservative response would miss.
Moreover, being more attuned to the dangers of the world does not make for pessimistic, fearful individuals and being less attuned to dangers does not make for carefree, hedonistic individuals. In fact, conservatives are consistently found to score higher than liberals on subjective well-being, even after controlling for socioeconomic status (Vigil 2010). Apparently, being responsive and attentive to negative aspects of the environment does not lead to depressive personalities. In fact, it may be that limiting the consequences of threats is a more manageable and defined goal than is pursuing novel experiences.
Finally, just as the tendency to read value judgments into the findings summarized here should be resisted, so should the tendency to conclude the results are stronger than they are. The connection of conservative political orientations and heightened orientation to negative stimuli is surprisingly consistent across designs, studies, and countries but it is also consistently modest in effect size. Many political conservatives are not particularly responsive to negative stimuli and many political liberals are. The reported effects, however, persist even when more traditional explanatory variables, such as standard sociodemographics, are included in the models. Moreover, to provide perspective, the effects of variation in negativity bias and related concepts, though modest, typically are at least as large as many of these standard variables.
The theoretical rationale for the negativity bias is that it is more difficult to overcome a fatal (or a near-fatal) assault than to return to an opportunity unpursued, so it is more adaptive to err on the side of caution as threats get nearer. Human taste buds respond to sweet, salty, sour, and bitter stimuli. Most can detect sweetness in approximately one part in 200, saltiness in one part in 400, sourness in one in 130,000, and bitterness in one in 2,000,000."