Is Political Difference Biological? | StarTalk

And so there's a recent book called "Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences." It was like, yeah, let's get some science! It's like, roll some science into this conversation! And it suggests that 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 call. John, are you there?

I am here. Hello, Neil.

Hey! So John, you operate a political physiology lab.

That's right. And you're at the University of 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 asking.

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 nonpolitical 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 dermal activity. We know that when the body is aroused, even mildly, the sweat glands open up a little bit. So this is easier 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 images. We want to look at the individual differences and see if those differences correlate with political beliefs.

So not everyone has that same reaction to something that could harm them, basically.

Exactly. Some people respond a lot more to things that could harm them than to 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.

There's some truth to that. And 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 - I, no. [laughs]

So who was more sensitive to this threat of violence?

The conservatives are, yeah. Across the board. We do a lot of things. For example, we do things with memory. We show them a whole bunch of pictures, some positive, some negative. Then we'll do a distracter task. Then we'll show them a whole bunch more pictures, some that they've seen before and some that they haven't. And we see who can remember things.

Liberals and conservatives remember about the same overall. But conservatives remember the negative images much better. The liberals remember the positive images much better.

Whoa. Wow. OK, so did the brains look different? Did different 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 patterns.

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. [laughs]