Research Shows Political Leanings Can Be Predicted by Reaction to Gross Images
Are you amazed at how things went in yesterday’s U.S. midterm election? Can you not believe your fellow citizens would vote that way (whichever way it is you disagree with)? Don’t blame them. A timely new study suggest they’re probably just wired that way. P. Read Montague of Virginia Tech was intrigued by studies showing that political affiliation actually seems to be heritable through generations and are tied to other factors such as a person’s attitudes toward sex and personal autonomy. He and his colleagues suspected that these leanings were all actually tied to deeper connections to how our bodies react to threats of “contamination or violence.” So they devised a simple experiment. They used an MRI to scan the brains of people while they looked at pleasant, neutral, and really gross images. The findings were compared to the subject’s scores on a standardized test of political leanings. They found that the gross images, especially images of animal mutilation, caused neural responses that were highly predictive of political orientation. “A