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So That Explains It...

Some political scientists, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports this morning, are exploring what they believe are genetic influences on political behavior.

If conservatives and liberals can?t see eye to eye, it may be because their brains are wired differently from birth, according to researchers who have for the first time found a link between people?s political leanings and their physiology.

The researchers? report, published in today?s issue of the journal Science, suggests that genetic differences may help explain why some people favor capital punishment and the Iraq War, while others support gun control and foreign aid. It?s part of a growing field, called ?genopolitics,? that is threatening to rewrite the rules of political science, which hold that political beliefs are shaped by people?s environment and experiences. To work in the new field, political scientists are scrambling to learn genetics, neuroscience, and other aspects of biology.

Here?s an example of this work in progress from the University of Nebraska:

In the laboratory, the participants completed a survey to gauge their support for policies such as foreign aid, pacifism, gun control, defense spending, patriotism, capital punishment, and the Iraq War. Then researchers measured the electrical conductivity of the subjects' skin?a function of how much they were sweating?while they watched images on a computer screen. Some of the pictures depicted innocuous subjects, like a bowl of fruit, while others portrayed a bloody face and a large spider on person's face.

Subjects who reacted most to the second type of image were more likely to support policies such as warrantless searches, school prayer, and the USA Patriot Act, according to the researchers.

In a second test, Mr. Hibbing's group measured how strongly the subjects blinked their eyes when they heard loud unexpected noises. The results matched the earlier findings, with participants more likely to react strongly if they held political views along the conservative end of the spectrum.

Interesting, perhaps, but isn?t all this just another example of social science (now aspiring to be hard science) telling us what we already knew? Many of us have long suspected, for example, that the wiring of liberals was defective, resulting in short circuits, mixed signals, and lack of power in many situations where strong and principled responses are called for.

Full post as published by Discriminations on September 19, 2008 (boomark / email).