Is Political Philosophy Biologically Determined?

Dec. 15, 2010 — -- The national obsession in the United States isn't football, or money, or even sex. It's politics. And we form our judgments entirely on the basis of critical assessment of candidates and political philosophies, free of any internal bias that is beyond our control.

Well, maybe not.

New research suggests there may be a biological reason why some folks turn left while others turn right. Maybe liberals and conservatives literally can't quite see eye to eye.

A provocative new study out of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln suggests we may not be as open-minded as we think, and it's all because of biology. Finding a biological basis for everything from believing in God to picking a mate is all the rage these days, but this study explores new territory.

"It's well established in almost any scientific discipline that there are biological influences on behavior," Mike Dodd, lead author of the study, said in a telephone interview. "But political scientists have been kind of resistant to that because they like to think that political temperament is entirely environmentally determined. It's based on your experience."

That attitude doesn't necessarily apply to Dodd's coauthors, John R. Hibbing and Kevin B. Smith, political science professors at the university who have been searching for some time now for evidence that there is a biological component to formulating our "political temperament."

And the three believe they have found something that literally separates liberals from conservatives. These opposite ends of the political spectrum respond differently to something called "gaze cues," the shifting of a person's attention from one place to another in an attempt to see where another person is looking.

What they have found so far is liberals are easily distracted when a face on a computer screen shows a person looking one way or the other. The liberal will mimic the face's action, looking in the same direction as the face. That's called following a "gaze-cue." Conservatives were far more likely to remain fixed on the eyes of the face, less distracted.

Why? Well, this gets a little debatable. In their study, to be published in the journal Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, the researchers offer these assumptions:

That stops short of saying conservatives are tough minded and liberals are wishy-washy. So the assumptions may not please everyone. But the research is intriguing.