Both liberals and conservatives are capable of letting their feeling get in the way of their thinking. That's
been known for some time now. But what is less well-known is that the conservative mindset is
correlated with a propensity towards paranoia:
conservatives respond much more rapidly to threatening and aversive stimuli (for instance, images of "a very large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody face, and an open wound with maggots in it," as one of their papers put it).
In other words, the conservative ideology, and especially one of its major facets—centered on a strong military, tough law enforcement, resistance to immigration, widespread availability of guns—would seem well tailored for an underlying, threat-oriented biology.
The authors go on to speculate that this ultimately reflects an evolutionary imperative. "One possibility," they write, "is that a strong negativity bias was extremely useful in the Pleistocene," when it would have been super-helpful in preventing you from getting killed.
A
good summary:
research shows that conservatives have more of a “negativity bias”, which means “they are physiologically more attuned to negative (threatening, disgusting) stimuli in their environments.” In other words, they are more fearful and respond more to fear-mongering than liberals. Fox News could have told you that, but it’s always nice to have some scientific evidence.
And that’s what these conservative urban legends are about: Conservatives keeping each other in a heightened state of fear by constantly warning each other about the endless threats to their safety, their identity, their masculinity, their religious holidays, whatever they’re hyped up about today. And using that fear to justify reactionary politics.
At the risk of over-generalizing, it may simply be brain differences that divide us into liberal and conservative camps. People who are psychologically "high strung" -- able to be terrified easily -- may move towards conservatism as a way to manage anxiety. Are right-wingers' stances on the strong military, law enforcement, lots of guns around, etc., all just preferences that arise from fear, not reason?
