28 John Hibbing - The Biology of Ideology

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Apr 4, 2014

John Hibbing, a political scientist who studies the physiological and genetic bases of ideology, joins to explore biological roots of liberal and conservative differences. Conversations cover eye-tracking and negativity bias, twin-study heritability estimates, how perception shapes policy preferences, and why political diversity may be evolutionarily adaptive.

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INSIGHT

Broad Biological Differences Between Left And Right

Liberals and conservatives differ across cognition, tastes, and physiology, not just ideology.
John Hibbing says these differences show up everywhere from attention to sympathetic nervous responses.

INSIGHT

Negativity Bias Revealed By Eye Tracking

Eye-tracking shows conservatives fixate faster and longer on negative images compared with liberals.
Hibbing interprets this as a measurable negativity bias shaping what conservatives attend to in the world.

INSIGHT

Different Perceptions Shape Policy Preferences

Differences in perception extend to neutral stimuli, with conservatives reading neutral faces as more angry or fearful.
Hibbing links these perceptual differences to policy preferences like stronger defense or harsher punishments.

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Thomas Jefferson was a smart dude. And in one of his letters to John Adams, dated June 27, 1813, Jefferson made an observation about the nature of politics that science is only now, two centuries later, beginning to confirm. "The same political parties which now agitate the United States, have existed through all time," wrote Jefferson. "The terms of Whig and Tory belong to natural, as well as to civil history," he later added. "They denote the temper and constitution of mind of different individuals."
Tories were the British conservatives of Jefferson's day, and Whigs were the British liberals. What Jefferson was saying, then, was that whether you call yourself a Whig or a Tory has as much to do with your psychology or disposition as it has to do with your ideas. At the same time, Jefferson was also suggesting that there's something pretty fundamental and basic about Whigs (liberals) and Tories (conservatives), such that the two basic political factions seem to appear again and again in the world, and have for "all time."
Jefferson didn't have access to today's scientific machinery—eye tracker devices, skin conductance sensors, and so on. Yet these very technologies are now being used to reaffirm his insight. At the center of the research are many scholars working at the intersection of psychology, biology, and politics, but one leader in the field is John Hibbing, a political scientist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln whose "Political Physiology Laboratory" has been producing some pretty stunning results.
This week, we talk to Hibbing about his research and what he says we actually do now know about these important differences between liberals and conservatives.
This episode also features a discussion of whether we are finally on the verge of curing AIDS, and new research suggesting that great landscape painters, like JMW Turner, were actually able to capture the trace of volcanic eruptions, and other forms of air pollution, in the color of their sunsets.
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