Is Political Difference Biological? | StarTalk

and so there’s a recent book called
predisposed liberals conservatives and
the biology of political differences
like yeah let’s get some science
roll some science into this conversation
and it’s a Jeff the political views may
be hardwired into our DNA oh my gosh
and we have the author of that book
political scientist John Hibbing
standing by live right now on video
calls John are you there I am here hello
alien
so don’t you operate a political
physiology lab that’s right your thing
University Nebraska at Lincoln that’s
correct excellent so what is a political
physiology lab well political physiology
is an attempt to measure how people
react to stimuli without apps you just
get them thinking about stuff and you
get to see how the brains differ that’s
right exactly
and the simple thing to do would be to
show them pictures of Barack Obama or
Donald Trump but we actually go the next
step and show them non-political images
and see if there are differences across
the political spectrum and how they
respond to those images ooh
so what have you found well our kind of
go to measure is electoral journal
activity you know we know that when the
body is aroused when mildly the sweat
glands open up a little bit so this is
easy to measure and we can see if people
are tending to respond more strongly to
negative images like a picture of a bear
or positive images like a picture of a
loved one and we know overall that
people respond more to negative image we
want to look at individual differences
and see if those differences correlate
but actually so not everyone has the
same reaction to something that could
harm them basically exactly some people
respond a lot more to things that could
harm them under things that they love
other people respond about the same so
it seems to me if you were to make a
political career
you could get everyone who has that
sensitivity to vote for you by feeding
that fear just some truth to that and
you know I think where you’re going with
that is that you might see some of that
happening in the political arena today
no I wasn’t no I
No so who was more sensitive to the
threat of violence victims are yeah
across the board we do a lot of things
for example we do things with memory we
showed them a whole bunch of pictures
and some positive some negative then
we’ll do a distractor task then we’ll
show them a whole bunch more picture
some that they’ve seen before and some
what they happen and we see who can
remember the liberals and conservatives
remember about the same overall but
conservatives remember the negative if
it just much but the liberals remember
the positive if it is much better okay
so so did the brains look different when
using the dim parts lit up yeah we have
done some neuroimaging work and it
really is pretty easy to predict who is
a liberal who’s a conservative simply on
the basis of looking at the brain
activation pattern so it would have been
fun to have this conversation with you
with an image of your brain like right
next to you just so we can see what’s
lit up or not as you spoke I think
that’s none of your business
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