It's All in Your Head

"The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."

What is it that makes you a conservative or a liberal? Most of us tend to think that it is a reflection of our upbringing, values, and/or education. Most of all, we think that we freely choose our political beliefs and affiliations. But perhaps our choice isn't as free as we'd like to think...

I hate it when I can't link to source material and have to settle for second-hand reports, but this was just too interesting to pass up. A recent study in Science reveals a correlation between political attitudes and certain physiological responses that begs the question - Are our political attitudes determined in part by our physiological sensitivity?

In this study, the people who reacted more strongly to adverse stimuli also seemed to be the ones who held political views that could be construed as defensive and threat-oriented. The people who exhibited less of a physiological response to the adverse stimuli seemed to be the ones who favored policies that are characterized by openness. This is the kind of finding that, if replicable, is beautiful in its simplicity but scary for its implications. Of course, correlation is not causation, and it's also possible that one's attitudes create a biofeedback loop that modifies future responses to similar stimuli. Or that the correlation is underwritten by another unidentified variable. So take what follows with a grain of salt.

You think that I'm now going to talk about the nature of 'free will' and how, perhaps, it isn't so 'free'. Wrong. My mind went in another direction altogether. When faced with the simple idea that physiological sensitivity may determine how we perceived and evaluate threats, my mind went straight to psychopharmaceuticals, and I'm now entertaining the following questions...

What is the relationship between anti-anxiety drugs and/or antidepressents, and the strength with which these types of political convictions are held? Are political attitudes characterized by a defensive response to 'threat' noticeably weaker when the strength of the physiological response to stimuli has been pharmacologically weakened? How would attitudes or the strength of convictions change over a longer course of psychopharmacological treatment? As we increasingly become the Medication Nation, what changes will we see (or have we already seen) in cultural and political attitudes as a result of our psychopharmocological usage? Are we just a Valium away from voting for more tolerance and less aggression?

That's all way too much to read into a single study, yet alone a quick summary of a single study. But they are interesting questions...

Update: A much more detailed description of this paper can be found here.