The Startle Reflex: Key to Your Politics
“Political views are often so staunchly held that one wonders whether they aren’t hard-wired into a person’s genes. Indeed, in the past, twin studies have suggested that DNA may play a role in determining political attitudes. Although no one has yet discovered a gene for, say, supporting the war in Iraq, a small new study by political scientists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and other institutions reports another association between a person’s biology and his politics….
Researchers shied away from using labels such as conservative and liberal in their study, but they concede that volunteers who registered a heightened sense of threat also tended to subscribe to conservative attitudes. “It’s not that conservatives are ‘fraidy cats,” says Kevin Smith, a political science professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and one of the study’s co-authors. “It’s that people who support socially protective policies — which, yes, can be interpreted as people taking a conservative position on those policies — are more sensitive to environmental threat.”"
