In case you haven’t noticed, election season is upon us! Ok, it has been upon us for almost two years, but never mind that. Pollsters are busy trying to determine why people might be voting for one candidate or another, with special attention being paid to the so-called undecided voters, on whose last-minute whim the fate of the nation -- and the world -- seems to hinge.
Two recent studies, however, provide much food for thought about why people vote one way or the other, and about the reasons they give to themselves and others.
A paper by Douglas Oxley and collaborators in Science (19 September) investigated the effect of physiological reactions to a perceived threat on people’s political opinions
Oxley and colleagues discovered that people who react physiologically (as measured by changes in their skin conductance) to sudden noises or to threatening images are much more likely to support conservative issues like gun control, the war in Iraq, restrictions in immigration and so forth.
clipped from: www.scientificblogging.com