Science magazine reports an Italian study that discloses more physiological differences between liberals and conservatives. Participants in an experiment were shown images of politicians looking to their left or right. Participants were asked to look left or right depending on the color of a small square placed between the politician's eyes, but the real experimental goal was to see how strongly the participants followed the politician's gaze left or right. Self-described conservative participants looking at conservative politicians tended to look in the direction the politician looked even if the colored square instructed them to look the opposite way. Liberal participants were less likely to follow the gaze of liberal politicians. The experimenters compared the conservatives’ behavior to animal studies which found that subordinate primates follow the gaze of dominant monkeys.
I add that this is consistent with the tendency of House Republicans to vote 100% with their leadership’s desires. The experiment results above also are consistent with the famous Will Rogers quote: I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.
Study by Marco Tullio Liuzza, a social neuroscientist, published in PLoS ONE. From Science 7 Oct, 2011, p 25.
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