Stephan: I had two of my rightwing readers write today chastizing me for the piece I ran the yesterday on the psychophysiology of right-wing voters. As soon as I read criticism such as this, and it begins by talking about left-wing whatever, I know I am reading someone's fears and prejudices having little or nothing to do with actual research. It prompts me, once again, to say the following: I have an anthropological interest in political parties, but not a partisan one.
What I care about and cover is social outcome data, and the trends it creates. My bias is: Does this trend foster wellbeing or not? At the moment I loathe the Republican Party because almost every policy it espouses degrades individual and social wellbeing. Indeed I don't think it is possible to be a Republican and an ethical person as the Trumplican version of the party now exists. I make no secret of that. And if the Democrats behaved in the same manner I would say the same of them. They have their own corporatist corruption issues, but they don't kidnap immigrant children from their parents, or destroy environmental protections, and degrade public education.
What I think most of the media, and most of the population don't understand is that partisanship of whichever stripe has a psychophysical profile. Here is a fact-based report on this, from a psychology journal and, also, a small sampling of the recent research literature should you wish to dig a little deeper.
The social neuroscience of race-based and status-based prejudice.
Mattan BD, Wei KY, Cloutier J, Kubota JT.
Curr Opin Psychol. 2018 Apr 19;24:27-34. doi: 10.1016/j.copsyc.2018.04.010. [Epub ahead of print] Review.
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Peer-reviewed research shows that conservatives are more sensitive to threat. While this threat-bias can distort reality, fuel irrational fears, and make one more vulnerable to fear-mongering politicians, it could also promote hypervigilance, perhaps making one better prepared to handle an immediate threat.
1. Conservatives tend to focus on the negative
In a 2012 study, liberal and conservative participants were shown collages of both negative and positive images on a computer screen while their eye movements were recorded. While liberals were quicker to look at pleasant images, like a happy child or a cute bunny rabbit, conservatives tended to behave oppositely. They’d first inspect threatening and disturbing pictures—things like car wrecks, spiders on faces, and open wounds crawling with maggots—and would also tend to dwell on them for longer. This is what psychologists call a “negativity bias”. If you think about it, this makes a lot of sense. When attention is biased toward the negative, the result is an overly threat-conscious appraisal of one’s surroundings. Essentially, to many conservatives the […]
