Brain scans show that people who self-identify as conservative have larger and more active right amygdalas, an area of the brain that's associated with expressing and processing fear. This aligns with the idea that feeling afraid makes people lean more to the right. One study showed conservative brains tend to have more activity in their right amygdalas when they're taking risks than liberals do.
Groundbreaking research that Yale psychologists published in revealed that helping people imagine they're completely safe from harm can make them temporarily hold more liberal views on social issues. The authors of that study said their results suggest that socially conservative views are driven, at least in part, by people's need to feel safe and secure.
A study of college students showed that those with more socially conservative views were quicker to physically look away from disgusting images — like pictures of blood, feces, or vomit — than their liberal peers.
The self-reported social conservatives also stared longer at photos of other people reacting in disgust to icky stuff. This research backs up other studies that have suggested conservatives are more easily grossed out than liberals. A gut reaction of disgust is, evolutionarily speaking, a good thing for survival, since it helps humans keep some foreign and potentially dangerous secretions at bay.
But in our modern world, some research suggests this kind of aversion toward "impure" pathogens may also impact how people see other people who aren't like them, including social "out-groups" like immigrants or foreigners. A study at Northwestern University found that when conservative and liberal college students were given word problems to solve, both groups managed to arrive at some correct answers through gradual, analytical analysis.
But when feeling stuck on a problem, liberals were much more likely to draw upon a sudden burst of insight — an 'aha' moment, like a lightbulb turning on in the brain.
This didn't mean that the liberals were any smarter than the conservatives. Rather, it showed that their brains had a tendency to reorganize their thoughts in more flexible ways, while the conservatives tended to take a more step-by-step approach.
The researchers suggested this finding may indicate that liberals and conservatives prefer solving problems in different ways. Lead study author Carola Salvi said the results were consistent with what scientists already knew about the brains of people with different political leanings. In , researchers at the University of Nebraska tested whether conservatives and liberals physically see the world in different ways.
They found that when it comes to matching the gaze of other people, the two groups differ. The scientists measured this by having individual study participants watch a certain point on a computer screen and wait for a ball to show up in the frame.
Then they added a distracting human face on the screen before the ball appeared. The face's eyes would look around. The scientists watched their participants to see if they followed the wandering gaze.
The researchers found that the liberal participants tended to follow the direction of the eyes on the screen. Conservatives, on the other hand, weren't as swayed by their pixelated peers, and kept waiting for the ball. A review of decades of research on conservative people suggested that their social views can help satisfy "psychological needs" to make sense of the world and manage uncertainty and fear. Studies from the s showed that conservatives preferred more simple paintings, familiar music, and unambiguous texts and poems, while liberals enjoyed more cubist and abstract art.
Although that research dates back to a drastically different political climate, the findings hold up in more recent studies from , and A second majority-minority group, Devout and Diverse , faces even tougher financial hardships than Disaffected Democrats. Devout and Diverse also are the most politically mixed typology group about a quarter lean Republican , as well as the least politically engaged.
Like Disaffected Democrats, they are critical of government regulation of business. In addition to the eight main groups in the political typology, a ninth group — the Bystanders — is missing in action politically. Almost no one in this relatively young, largely minority group is registered to vote and most pay little or no attention to politics and government. While both parties are divided internally, partisanship remains a defining feature of American political life.
Across the eight main typology groups, majorities either affiliate with or lean toward either the Republican or Democratic Party.
The power of partisanship is reflected in attitudes about Donald Trump. Overall, Trump gets his most positive ratings among the two most solidly Republican groups, Core Conservatives and Country First Conservatives. The two largest groups in the political typology — Core Conservatives on the right and Solid Liberals on the left — make up an even larger share of their partisan coalitions when political engagement is factored in. Core Conservatives are more likely than other GOP-leaning groups to say they follow politics and government most of the time and say they always vote.
At the other end of the political typology, Solid Liberals constitute by far the largest proportion of politically engaged Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. That is about the same proportion as the other Democratic-leaning groups combined. The midterm elections are still more than a year away, but the two groups at either end of the political typology are already highly motivated by the battle for congressional control.
At this point, other groups are less engaged by the struggle for partisan control of Congress. And the drop-off is particularly notable among three groups close to the middle of the typology. The political typology sorts Americans into cohesive, like-minded groups based on their values and beliefs, as well as their partisan affiliation. The current study, which comes 30 years after the first political typology , is based on surveys conducted June among 2, adults and June July 9 among 2, adults, with a follow-up survey conducted Aug.
In the U. In the s, some of the more extreme Federalists tried to counter the democratic gains of the preceding decade in the name of liberty. Yet such views were slower to gain traction in the United States than in Europe. But by the end of the 19th century, conservative attempts to reclaim the concept of freedom did catch on. The abolition of slavery, rapid industrialization and mass migration from Europe expanded the agricultural and industrial working classes exponentially, as well as giving them greater political agency.
William Graham Sumner, an influential Yale professor, likewise spoke for many when he warned of the advent of a new, democratic kind of despotism—a danger that could best be avoided by restricting the sphere of government as much as possible.
When conservative politicians like Rand Paul and advocacy groups FreedomWorks or the Federalist Society talk about their love of liberty, they usually mean something very different from civil rights activists like John Lewis—and from the revolutionaries, abolitionists and feminists in whose footsteps Lewis walked. In response, another capitalist would build a factory to provide these consumer goods and factory widgets, in a virtuous cycle. The idea was that if you got the cycle going fast enough through free trade rules and low taxes — in those days usually raised during wartime, so wars had to be avoided — the value of a worker would go up while the price of goods would go down.
The new Liberals ultimately replaced the Whigs and led the British government off-and-on for the next 70 years, all the way to World War I. More important, their theories about small government were often predominant across party lines. That changed somewhere around the turn of the 20th century, when a new party, the Labour Party, arose arguing that the Liberals were not willing to do what was needed to help the struggling. For generations, hands-off liberalism had allowed poverty to persist, said people like Scottish M.
Kier Hardie. The trend of economic interventionism quickly caught on in the United States.
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