<p>Ever wondered why conservatives and liberals never agree with each other in politics? </p>.<p>It’s because they pay attention to their environments differently that makes them not to see eye-to-eye quite literally, a new study has found.<br /><br />Researchers at the University of Nebraska in the US found that conservatives pay more attention to negative stimuli compared with liberals.<br /><br />“They (conservatives) are essentially monitoring things that make them feel uncomfortable, which does feel fairly consistent with conservative policies, actually,” study author Mike Dodd, a psychologist at Nebraska, told LiveScience.<br /><br />“They tend to confront things head-on that they view as threats, things like immigration and so on.”<br /><br />However, Dodd was quick to note that the kind of stimuli a person pays more attention to does not make them better or worse than someone of another political persuasion. But the findings could suggest a biological basis for political views.<br /><br />“Based on your biology, you might be experiencing and processing something in a fundamentally different way from someone else,” he added.<br /><br />For their study, published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Dodd and his colleagues had 48 adults who were strongly conservative or strongly liberal look at a series of 33 pictures.Some of the pictures were pleasant, such as that of a fluffy bunny. Others, including a picture of a maggot-infested wound and another of a man with a spider on his face, were downright disgusting.<br /><br />While the participants looked at the photos, researchers monitored their skin conductance, a measure of minute changes in sweating that reveals how excited and emotional someone feels, in this case, about a given image.<br /><br />They found that conservatives responded more strongly to the negative images.<br /><br />In a second experiment, the researchers repeated the procedure with images of polarising politicians, including Bill Clinton and George W Bush. Again, they found a political difference: Conservatives responded more strongly to leaders they disagreed with, such as Clinton, than they did to politicians they liked.<br /><br />Liberals, on the other hand, had a stronger physiological reaction to politicians they agreed with than they did to politicians they disliked. The findings provide extra evidence that basic biology may play a role in political choices, Dodd added.Past studies have also uncovered a series of clues suggesting that political preference is somewhat influenced by biology.<br /><br />Conservatives have been found to be more squeamish than liberals, while liberals pay more attention to the eye movements of others compared with conservatives.<br />These differences are at the level of reflexes and rely on extremely basic brain processes such as attention. </p>
<p>Ever wondered why conservatives and liberals never agree with each other in politics? </p>.<p>It’s because they pay attention to their environments differently that makes them not to see eye-to-eye quite literally, a new study has found.<br /><br />Researchers at the University of Nebraska in the US found that conservatives pay more attention to negative stimuli compared with liberals.<br /><br />“They (conservatives) are essentially monitoring things that make them feel uncomfortable, which does feel fairly consistent with conservative policies, actually,” study author Mike Dodd, a psychologist at Nebraska, told LiveScience.<br /><br />“They tend to confront things head-on that they view as threats, things like immigration and so on.”<br /><br />However, Dodd was quick to note that the kind of stimuli a person pays more attention to does not make them better or worse than someone of another political persuasion. But the findings could suggest a biological basis for political views.<br /><br />“Based on your biology, you might be experiencing and processing something in a fundamentally different way from someone else,” he added.<br /><br />For their study, published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Dodd and his colleagues had 48 adults who were strongly conservative or strongly liberal look at a series of 33 pictures.Some of the pictures were pleasant, such as that of a fluffy bunny. Others, including a picture of a maggot-infested wound and another of a man with a spider on his face, were downright disgusting.<br /><br />While the participants looked at the photos, researchers monitored their skin conductance, a measure of minute changes in sweating that reveals how excited and emotional someone feels, in this case, about a given image.<br /><br />They found that conservatives responded more strongly to the negative images.<br /><br />In a second experiment, the researchers repeated the procedure with images of polarising politicians, including Bill Clinton and George W Bush. Again, they found a political difference: Conservatives responded more strongly to leaders they disagreed with, such as Clinton, than they did to politicians they liked.<br /><br />Liberals, on the other hand, had a stronger physiological reaction to politicians they agreed with than they did to politicians they disliked. The findings provide extra evidence that basic biology may play a role in political choices, Dodd added.Past studies have also uncovered a series of clues suggesting that political preference is somewhat influenced by biology.<br /><br />Conservatives have been found to be more squeamish than liberals, while liberals pay more attention to the eye movements of others compared with conservatives.<br />These differences are at the level of reflexes and rely on extremely basic brain processes such as attention. </p>