You are in a restaurant with people you don’t know very well and you propose to split a salad with one of them. You recommend a salad with arugula (a bitter-tasting green) which your co-diner politely declines. Have you learned anything about this person? Well, a whole bunch of research would predict that your co-diner most likely has conservative leanings. *
If you are surprised, so was I when I came across the article “The Yuck Factor” in the March 2019 issue of The Atlantic. By that time, I had read Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind and how our moral foundations matrix (based on evolutionary factors) explains our political orientation. Then I read BEHAVE by Robert Sapolsky and again I encountered a whole section on the relationship of politics to psychological and biological factors.
Sapolsky asks three questions: (a) Do political orientations tend to be internally consistent for each one of us, that is, do they come as a package? If you are for domestic law and order, do you also support foreign intervention to keep international order? His answer is: Usually. (b) Do such consistent orientations arise from deep, implicit factors with remarkably little to do with specific political issues? He replies: Yup. And (c) Can one begin to detect the bits of biology underlying these factors? He writes: Of course.
The internal consistency of our political orientations is in full display in surveys about various issues and party affiliation. Democrats tend to be pro-choice, recognize climate change, favor safety net programs, and pro-immigrant. Republicans tend toward the opposite direction. According to Sapolsky, there are underlying factors that explain these differences. Conservatives are more uncomfortable with ambiguity and more likely to perceive threats (e.g., from immigrants or Muslims). Conservatives also dislike novelty, are more comforted by structure and hierarchy, and are more parochial in their empathy. As a result, conservatives like loyalty, conformity, and authority. (Consider for example the greater party solidarity among Republicans than Democrats.) Conservatives’ dislike of change and novelty also makes them nostalgic of the past. (That can explain why Make America Great Again resonates so intensely with Republicans).
On the other end of the political orientation spectrum stand the liberals who place more emphasis on caring and fairness. Because liberals are more comfortable with novelty and change, they are more inclined to do away with established social and religious norms in order to serve their priorities, like reducing poverty and inequality, and promoting LBGTQ and women’s rights. Conservatives on their part are more inclined to resort to power of authority in order to preserve their own priorities, safety and conformity.
What about the biological origins of political orientation? This takes us back to the emotional pair of disgust and fear of threat. Studies have shown that conservatives have lower thresholds of disgust than liberals. Thus, in experiments, conservatives are found to experience greater activation of the amygdala (the brain area that perceives threats and controls anxiety) when presented with disgusting images. So, if you puke you rebuke. If you associate migrants with diseases, find some sexual relationship distasteful, and your taste receptors are more sensitive, to bitter and other unfamiliar tastes, you are more likely to have conservative leanings. After all the emotion of disgust is one of the mechanisms of detecting threats and as such it plays an evolutionary role in survival.
There is also evidence that brains with more gray matter in the cingulate cortex, which regulates empathy, are more linked to liberalism whereas brains with bigger amygdala are more linked to conservatism. According to Sapolsky, the brains of conservatives are more likely to process threats and disdainful stimuli at the visceral level whereas the brains of liberals are more likely to temper visceral reaction with some rationalization that takes place in the frontal cortex.
These differences in biological factors do not bestow superiority or inferiority to liberalism or conservatism. Each leaning aims toward survival but by different means. Their coexistence in a society can protect both liberals and conservatives from their most extreme predilections. Thus, the liberal tendency to break with the past, embrace the new, and charge forward can benefit from the conservative hesitancy toward novel and untested experiences and the higher sensitivity to threats. So, this is one practical consequence of liberalism and conservatism operating within a society.
Another thing to keep in mind is that genetic predilections are just the first draft of one’s personality. As Jonathan Haidt suggests individuals follow different life paths in which they encounter different experiences and undergo adaptation processes which further shape their personalities. Sapolsky always emphasizes that attention to genetics without accounting for the environment leads down to wrong conclusions. For example, experiments have shown that under certain conditions liberals and conservatives become, respectively, more conservative or more liberal.
Personality and political orientation are also affected by the personal narratives each one of us constructs to make our actions and decisions meaningful and part of a bigger purpose. For better or worse, personal narratives are often influenced by outside narratives, mostly associated with religious beliefs and political ideologies. Do these outside narratives push us toward a more calibrated and thoughtful processing of our visceral feelings or do they play on our innate fears and resentments?
How do we explain, for example, the growing polarization of the American public over the last twenty or so years? It cannot be that all of the sudden the genetic predilections for liberalism and conservatism grew more extreme. Nature does not work with such abrupt jolts. What has happened is that the environment we find ourselves has changed dramatically over this period. Immigration, social and job displacement, and inequality have grown into bigger problems. And within this environment, political, news media, and religious players have propagated narratives that have hardened our acceptance of the Other.
It would be easy to blame polarization on biology and genes. But it would be wrong. The solution is to motivate ourselves (as Sapolsky’s evidence would imply) to engage our brains more in the practice of critical reassessment of our visceral reflexes.
* Don’t expect every conservative friend of yours to reject your salad with arugula. The experiment among 64,000 Americans found that twice as many conservatives rejected arugula relative to liberals. This does not mean all conservatives in the sample rejected arugula. Statistical results based on samples only tell us what is likelier not what is absolutely certain.
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