So there’s been a bit of hoo-hah over a new study that has been reported as “conservatives are cowards”. First of all, if anyone has access to the AAAS website, I’d love a copy of the full paper. As it is, I’m going off of the abstract and some of the news articles about it. Here’s the abstract:
We present evidence that variations in political attitudes correlate with physiological traits. In a group of 46 adult participants with strong political beliefs, individuals with measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism, and gun control, whereas individuals displaying measurably higher physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favor defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism, and the Iraq War. Thus, the degree to which individuals are physiologically responsive to threat appears to indicate the degree to which they advocate policies that protect the existing social structure from both external (outgroup) and internal (norm-violator) threats.
As I understand it, they measured startle reactions and other physiological reactions to ‘stressful imagery’ (like images of injured people and threatening situations).
Rightwingers scare more easily than liberals, according to a new study.…
Jeebus, they went to all that trouble when they just could have asked Karl Rove? The GOP has been using fearmongering – on terrorism, evil axises, taxes, guns, God, gays etc etc – as a vote-getting tactic for how long now?
I’ll suggest an alternate interpretation and suggest that there may actually be something underneath this.
Col. Jeff Cooper – my first shooting instructor – is famous, for among other things, codifying a ‘defensive state of mind’ hierarchy which he expressed as follows (courtesy of John Schaefer):
White – Relaxed, unaware, and unprepared. If attacked in this state the only thing that may save you is the inadequacy and ineptitude of your attacker. When confronted by something nasty your reaction will probably be, “Oh my God! This can’t be happening to me.”
Yellow – Relaxed alertness. No specific threat situation. Your mindset is that “today could be the day I may have to defend myself.” There is no specific threat but you are aware that the world is an unfriendly place and that you are prepared to do something if necessary. You use your eyes and ears, and your carriage says “I am alert.” You don’t have to be armed in this state but if you are armed you must be in yellow. When confronted by something nasty your reaction will probably be, “I thought this might happen some day.” You can live in this state indefinitely.
Orange – Specific alert. Something not quite right has gotten your attention and you shift your primary focus to that thing. Something is “wrong” with a person or object. Something may happen. Your mindset is that “I may have to shoot that person.” Your pistol is usually holstered in this state. You can maintain this state for several hours with ease, or a day or so with effort.
Red – Fight trigger. This is your mental trigger. “If that person does “x” I will shoot them.” Your pistol may, but not necessarily, be in your hand.
In the shooting and defensive arts community, the class of people who don’t react to threats have a name – victims.
But there’s another interesting point here, and it goes to some of the underlying understandings of people who I tend to classify as liberal and conservative.
Liberals, like Dr. Pangloss, see the world as inherently benign and think that it is human agency that makes it otherwise. Conservatives, think that the world is inherently threatening, and see human action as the bulwark against the threats.
To a large extent, this summarizes modern liberal and conservative thinking – crime? “if we’d stop harassing those kids, they would stop being so violent.” foreign policy? “if we don’t act from a position of threatening strength, they will take advantage of us.”
It’s almost a restatement of the old problem of theodicy. Which in a way makes me less sanguine about bridging the gap. Religious wars are the hardest to prevent and the hardest to stop.
I think you are taking this study _much_ too seriously. Do you really think they started out deciding to test whether “sensitivity to sudden noises” distinguished between liberals and conservatives? Probably they measured all sorts of things, looking for something they could use to prove that liberals (or women or blacks or democrats) are superior. And do you doubt that if it had turned out that conservatives has lower rather than higher sensitivity, that this would also have been proof they were bad, e.g.: “Conservatives are less aware of the world around them and react more slowly to change.” In fact there was a recent study that claimed exactly this, based on the fact that conservatives performed less well in a specific video game.
And just how did these “scientists” manage to find any pacifists? I’ve never met one in my life, and certainly no liberal or left-winger qualifies. And if I support foreign aid, does that indicate I don’t “advocate policies that protect the existing social structure”? And just how does “patriotism” distinguish between liberals and conservatives? How dare they question anyone’s patriotism!
We also call them sheep.
Just think of Democratic pols as sheep dogs.
Ugh…that works better than I want it to.
Which world are we talking about?
The world of foreign policy is always full of threats, and only liberals of the foolish and trivial sort deny this.
In the domestic world, though, it’s quite the opposite of what you state. Conservatives see ordinary human social and economic relations as benign, while liberals see them as full of bogeymen that need to be dealt with by regulations, “sensitivity” and “diversity” mongering, court-ordered mandates, etc.
Cowardice isnt being afraid. Cowardice is how you respond to that fear. Courage is being afraid and doing the right thing anyway. I think the list AL posted is right- someone that has faced their fear and conquered it is more likely to be brave than someone taken completely unaware by danger.
This obviously explains why Conservatives are dominant in the low-risk fields of military service and small-business entrepreneurship and Liberals are dominant in the high-risk fields of academics and government employment.
Glad we know the reason for that dichotomy now.
Or, I guess another way to summarize this type of study would be to say “You can take the science out of phrenology, but you can’t take the phrenologist out of (certain) scientists.”
Mark Poling is right. Having myself been both a member of the Armed Services and a small business entrepreneur in my (increasingly) longish life, I must be twice the coward of the “average” lefty. But then probably the bravest thing I EVER did was join a university faculty in the social sciences as a registered Republican and live to tell about it. (Don’t even ask me how I slipped through and got hired)
PS: Nor, Marc, it would seem the bumps out of their skulls….
I never refer to leftists as ‘liberals’. They are extremely intolerant and illiberal.
If present-day leftists had the power send devout Christians and non-white Republicans to the gas chambers, they would do so without a moment’s remorse.
‘Studies’ like this are merely laying the groundwork for justifying such actions in the future.
“Republicans earn higher incomes than Democrats do.”:http://www.singularity2050.com/2006/06/a_take_on_the_l.html I suppose it takes ‘courage’ to be poor.
“The world of foreign policy is always full of threats, and only liberals of the foolish and trivial sort deny this. ”
Perhaps leftists represent the evolutionary equivalent of the creature that gets caught by the predator, while the right-wing person is the descendant of the creature that successfully evades the predator long enough to reproduce.
Leftists do put a large amount of effort towards preventing leftists from reproducing. Whether through abortion, gay marriage, or rent control, places with a lot of leftists have very low birth rates (SF, Manhattan).
It is also cultural. Every society has people who are frustrated, angry, inadequate, and unattractive to the opposite sex. In Islamic societies, these become jihadis. In the West, these become leftists that get body piercings and refuse to do what it takes to get a job in the private sector.
Here are the introductory and closing paragraphs so you can understand the context and purpose of this study a little better. What the media has to say about it is, of course, not necessarily the same as why the study was done or what the conclusions are.
The nature and source of political attitudes
have been the subject of much study (1–3).
Traditionally, such attitudes were believed
to be built from sensible, unencumbered reactions
to environmental events (4), but more recent research
emphasizes the built-in, almost “automatedâ€
quality of many political responses (5), which has
been suggested to be based in brain activation
variations in limbic regions (6–8). The research
task is now to determine why some people seem
primed to adopt certain political attitudes, whereas
others appear primed to adopt quite different
attitudes. For example, although images and reminders
of the terrorist attacks of 9-11 produce an
aggregate shift in political views (9, 10), the reasons
for individual variability in the degree of
attitudinal shifts are unknown.
One possibility is that people vary in general
physiology and that certain of these variations
encourage the adoption of particular political attitudes.
Broad, physiologically relevant traits
such as feelings of disgust and fear of disease
have been suggested to be related to political attitudes
(11, 12), and political beliefs can be predicted
by observing brain activation patterns in
response to unanticipated events, such as one
letter of the alphabet appearing on a computer
screen when the respondent expected a different
letter (13). A connection between self-reports of
felt threat and political attitudes has also been
identified in previous research (14–19).
The physiology of response to a perceived threat
is an attractive topic of investigation because an
appropriate response to environmental threat is
necessary for long-term survival and because
perceived threat produces a variety of reasonably
well-mapped, physically instantiated responses
(20). If the threat is abrupt, a defensive cascade of
linked, rapid extensor-flexor movement occurs
throughout the body within 30 to 50 ms (21),
presumably to reduce vital-organ vulnerability
(e.g., eye blink and retraction of the head). Less
immediately, perceived threat causes signals from
the sensory cortex to be relayed to the thalamus
and ultimately to the brain stem, resulting in
heightened noradrenergic activity in the locus
ceruleus (22). Acetylcholine, acting primarily
through the amygdala but also through the
hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (23), stimulates
release of epinephrine, which in turn leads
to activation of the sympathetic division of the
autonomic nervous system. Though these basic
response patterns apply in all people, individual
sensitivity to perceived threat varies widely (24).
To test the hypothesis that variations in physical
sensitivity to threat are associated with political
beliefs, in May 2007, we conducted a random
telephone sample of the population of Lincoln,
Nebraska.
Our data reveal a correlation between
physiological responses to threat and political
attitudes but do not permit firm conclusions
concerning the specific causal processes at work.
Particular physiological responses to threat could
cause the adoption of certain political attitudes, or
the holding of particular political attitudes could
cause people to respond in a certain physiological
way to environmental threats, but neither of these
seems probable. More likely is that physiological
responses to generic threats and political attitudes
on policies related to protecting the social order
may both derive from a common source. Parents
could both socialize their children to hold certain
political attitudes and condition them to respond
in a certain way to threatening stimuli, but conditioning
involuntary reflex responses takes immediate
and sustained reinforcement and punishment,
and it is unlikely that this conditioning varies
systematically across political beliefs.
Alternatively, political attitudes and varying
physiological responses to threat may both derive
from neural activity patterns, perhaps those surrounding
the amygdala. There is a connection between
localized activation of the amygdala and
aversive startle response (30). Amygdala activity
is also crucial in shaping responses to socially
threatening images (31, 32) and may be connected
to political predispositions. Indeed, given
that political and social attitudes are heritable
(33–36) and that amygdala activity also has been
traced to genetics (37–40), genetic variation relevant
to amygdala activity could affect both physiological
responses to threat and political attitudes
bearing on threats to the social order.
Our findings suggest that political attitudes
vary with physiological traits linked to divergent
manners of experiencing and processing environmental
threats. Consequently, our research
provides one possible explanation for both the
lack of malleability in the beliefs of individuals
with strong political convictions and for the
associated ubiquity of political conflict.
Only one sentence in that typically opaque bit of academic obfuscation actually matters:
Pursuant to A.L.’s overall point, the real problematic bit is the interpretation of what that correlation means.
The scary part of the long excerpt is the very last sentence:
Ummmmmm, pardon me, but anyone who finds utility in finding direct physiological causation for the “ubiquity of political conflict” is walking a dangerous path. (Does seeing risk there make me conservative? Okay, maybe. Give me a red triangle.) And of course, welcome back to the utility of phrenology.
Really, can’t we just say we don’t agree, instead of assuming the other party is somehow damaged?
How many conclusion leaps can we count — starting with the notion that arousal equals fear? Too many, I fear. 🙂 If it worked the other way, I conjecture the researchers would have called it “alertness”, “concernedness”, or something of the sort.
The quoted conjecture overreaches, greatly.
I’ll [only] be reading the paper [if someone compensates me for the AAAS doc fee. It looks too bogus upon cursory review of Vista’s excerpts for me to sink $10 into finding out — see below.]
[edited]
Using the DOI, found a link to the work. If you are not an AAAS member or subscriber to Science, the article costs $10 for 24 hours’ access. -Pretty nifty little racket, there.- Ahem. “(link)”:http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/search?DOI=10.1126%2Fscience.1157627&search_doi-submit.x=17&search_doi-submit.y=8&search_doi-submit=search
Wait, whhaaaaat?
bq. To test the hypothesis that variations in physical
sensitivity to threat are associated with political
beliefs, in May 2007, we conducted a random
telephone sample of the population of Lincoln,
Nebraska.
They reported based on a telephone survey? That’s the “science” they did?
Oh boy, my bogometer just pegged. Might be a bad reading. Anyone want to Paypal me $10 to check? Seriously.
In reply to #15, here’s more after the last paragraph about the sampling method:
Participants were screened [see supporting
online material (SOM)] to identify those
with strong political attitudes (regardless of the
content of those attitudes), and qualifying individuals
were invited to a lab in the city. During
the first visit, the 46 participants completed a
survey instrument (see SOM) ascertaining their
political beliefs, personality traits, and demographic
characteristics. During the second session,
about 2 months after the first, participants
were attached to physiological equipment, making
it possible to measure skin conductance and orbicularis
oculi startle blink electromyogram (EMG)
response (25).
Vista: Thanks for the additional info. Any chance you could email me a PDF? I’m working in the dark here. 🙂 I am also willing to ask the author(s) directly for a copy of the paper, but have not taken the time yet. Apologies.
[Update: Marc D has just emailed me a copy of the actual paper. Perusal and response to follow.]
Finally getting home from a long weekend… heard this story on NPR they scientist who studies this DELIBERATELY pointed out that you can’t make generalizations about this sort of study.
Does it mean that conservatives are easily spooked by those things outside the norm, or just that they have a more viceral action? Does it just mean that liberals ignore things that make them uncomfortable and therefore ‘just don’t get it’. He said that their was statistically relevant difference between conservatives and liberals was interesting. BUT HE DID NOT WANT TO DRAW CONCLUSIONS about what the reaction meant.
Just my 2 cents.
Alchemist:
Note also that the “lack of malleability” mentioned in the conclusion, even if present, cuts both ways.
Still reviewing the paper and tracing its citations at this time.
I think the conclusion to the article is reversed in sense, missing a “not”:
“if we don’t act from a position of threatening strength, they will take advantage of us.”
The liberal position would be that not having scary strength would avoid justified retaliation, no?