A researcher has discovered a possible cause for the rise of the Tea Party and the Republican Party’s increasing swing toward the far right — they have bad brains. No, really, it’s science.
According to the Telegraph:
So what has this got to do with science? Studies suggest that on average, and even across national boundaries, people who opt for the Left, and people who opt for the Right, tend to be identifiable not only by their stated ideologies but by their personalities and quantifiable psychological traits.
Psychologically, “liberals” (using the American sense of the term to describe people who tend to vote for mainstream Left-wing parties and hold generally progressive views) can be defined as being open to new experiences and more comfortable with nuance and difference.
And those who self-define as “conservatives” tend to prize order, tradition and certainty, as well as being suspicious of novel ideas and more distrustful of difference – at the extreme, they are psychologically “authoritarian” and inclined to view the world in black and white.
Oh, and those self-described conservatives also have a bigger amygdala — the region of the brain that processes fear and threat signals. But cultural and historical differences can affect how the biological proclivities present themselves:
… the American Right, to a much greater extent than in Britain, also exploited what we might call psychological authoritarianism. They rallied and appealed to a certain breed of conservatives, often highly religious, who tend to view the world in black and white, to be intolerant of uncertainty, and to be deeply riled by the most divisive of culture-war issues: race, feminism, homosexual rights, religion in public life and so on.
This shifted all of US politics sharply to the Right, and continues to do so, and provides a clear contrast with Britain, where the major parties of the Right and Left sit either side of a common centre ground. No mainstream Tory advocates banning abortion, or allowing free access to firearms, or scrapping state health care, for example — standard fare among modern US Republicans.
This is not to provide conservatives with a kind of loophole — the “I can’t help it, it’s my bad brain that made me sign the no-tax pledge” excuse will not be accepted. Why? Because scientists (mostly liberals, by the way) say there’s enough wiggle room between genetics, physiology and psychology to allow for a frisson of free will.
So although they may be slaves to their bad brains, conservatives still choose, to some extent, to be that way.
