John Alford, associate professor of political science at Rice University, is one of three authors of this new book.
On Wednesday, he said on Dennis Prager’s radio show: “One of the nicest examples of the physiological finding is dealing with perception of threat. Conservatives physiologically respond much more quickly and much more dramaticallyto threat, even if the threat is as abstract as a burst of white noise, a startle. The startle response of conservatives is much stronger. Conservatives are much more responsive to and attentive to threatening pictures. Liberals don’t physiologically respond much more to a picture of a snake than a picture of a rabbit while conservatives attend much more quickly to the picture of the snake and respond to it.”
“It fits with a stereotype that conservatives have of liberals, that they just don’t get it. It’s like Obama saying we’re going to Cuba because we don’t know that Castro is an enemy.”
From Amazon.com: Despite the oft-heard longing for consensus, unity, and peace, the universal rift between conservatives and liberals endures because people have diverse psychological, physiological, and genetic traits. These biological differences influence much of what makes people who they are, including their orientations to politics.
Political disputes typically spring from the assumption that those who do not agree with us are shallow, misguided, uninformed, and ignorant. Predisposed suggests instead that political opponents simply experience, process, and respond to the world differently. It follows, then, that the key to getting along politically is not the ability of one side to persuade the other side to see the error of its ways but rather the ability of each side to see that the other is different, not just politically, but physically.
