Political attitudes linked to startle reflexes

By Ed Yong | September 18, 2008 2:00 pm




That responses so involuntary could be linked to views which we hold to be reasoned and considered is certainly surprising, but Oxley is very careful in how he interprets his results. He notes that so far, he has only found a correlation – an association between the a person’s political attitudes and the way their body responds to startling sensations. The results say nothing about whether one causes the other- they don’t conclude that reactions to threats predispose people to one end of the political spectrum or conversely, that such beliefs cause people to react to threats in certain ways. And they definitely don’t suggest that being easily startled makes you conservative, while nonchalance in the face of threats begets liberalism.

Oxley’s conclusion is simply that political beliefs have some foundation in our basic biology and are not solely the product of experience, knowledge or upbringing. To a degree, differences in opinion correspond to differences in the way our bodies work, such that people who, for example, support the death penalty are physiologically different from those who, say, advocate gay marriage.


Oxley discovered this link by working with a large team of American social scientists. They called a random sample of local people over the phone and recruited 46 of them who held strong opinions spanning the entire political spectrum. The team asked these select few to fill a questionnaire that laid bare their political views, personality traits and demographic characteristics. 

Oxley were particularly interested in their stance on 18 issues that he deemed to reflect “a concern for protecting the social unit”. These included support for military spending, warrantless searches, the death penalty, the Patriot Act, obedience, patriotism, the Iraq War, school prayer and Biblical truth. They also included opposition to pacifism, immigration, gun control, foreign aid, compromise, premarital sex, gay marriage, abortion rights and pornography.

Based on their views on these issues, Oxley divided the volunteers into a “High-support” and a “Low-support” group. That split may well correspond to a conservative group and a liberal one, but Oxley states that he wasn’t deliberately aiming for such a divide – after all, he ignored their responses to questions about economic issues. Instead, he wanted a split that would reflect how strongly the recruits react to threats to their social unit. He then gave them something to be threatened by.

Each person was hooked up to physiological measuring equipment and made to watch a stream of 33 images, three of which were particularly shocking – a very large spider on the face of a scared person, a dazed individual with a bloody face and a festering, maggot-infested wound. As the images flickered by, the team measured how easily electricity flowed across the volunteers’ skin (its ‘conductance’).  The current’s passage is easier when people experience strong emotional reactions because the outermost layer of their skin becomes moist.

They found that the skin conductance readings for the high-support group shot up when they saw the shocking visuals, while those of the low-support group stayed at an even baseline. When non-threatening images were shown, (a bunny, a happy child and a fruit-bowl) both groups reacted in the same unfazed way.

Not content with assaulting the recruits’ vision, Oxley’s team challenged their hearing too. They were asked to focus on a point on a computer screen while wearing headphones, which occasionally played loud bursts of white noise at them. We all blink involuntarily when we hear startling noises but people in the high-support group blinked more than twice as hard as those from the low-support group.


Cause and correlation

Of course, other factors such as age could affect both a person’s physiology and their political view. To account for this, Oxley adjusted all his readings to account for the recruits’ age, gender, income and education level (the fact that all but one of them was white meant that adjusting for race was pointless). Even after this fine-tuning, the results held their statistical ground.

As I said earlier, Oxley isn’t implying that physiology determines political opinion, or vice versa. Indeed, he thinks that it’s most likely that both startle reflexes and viewpoints on socially protective policies stem from a common source. It’s possible that this source is an external one – parents, for example, could raise their children with specific beliefs and condition them to respond in specific ways to threats. But Oxley thinks that is unlikely – changes in skin conductance and blinking are both involuntary reflexes that take a sustained programme of conditioning to change.

Instead, he believes that the correlation reflects underlying patterns brain activity, perhaps in an small, almond-shaped part of the brain called the amygdala. This area is involved in emotional learning and, among its other duties, it shapes our responses to threatening imagery. The amygdala’s activity is affected by genetic variation and Oxley suggests that this variation could affect both the way we physically respond to threats to our person and mentally respond to threats to our social order.

Indeed, there’s growing evidence that political attitudes themselves are to some extent influenced by genes. These innate foundations could help to explain why people with strong political beliefs tend to be unshakeable in their convictions and why political conflict is so omnipresent.

Reference: D. R. Oxley, K. B. Smith, J. R. Alford, M. V. Hibbing, J. L. Miller, M. Scalora, P. K. Hatemi, J. R. Hibbing (2008). Political Attitudes Vary with Physiological Traits Science, 321 (5896), 1667-1670 DOI: 10.1126/science.1157627

Image: by Douglas Oxley

Comments (8)

  1. uncleroadkill

    The conclusions of this study are wayy overreaching the evidence. So many factors from the environment affect our “startle response,” that reducing it to biology is pointless. Imagine the city dweller, assaulted by so many triggers in their daily environment that their startle response over time begins to respond only to very immediate threats. The country dweller meanwhile in their apparently more stable environment, reacts strongly to minor stimuli in comparison. Given that you can train yourself to lessen your autonomic reactions in a matter of weeks with deep breathing or biofeedback, I would say that reactiveness to stimuli is a poor indicator of concern for the social unit. What we are seeing here is that the more reactive to stimulus cues you are, the more likely you are to harbor reactionary political beliefs. Go figure, a sheltered environment produces conservative politics.

  2. PETE

    Main Entry:
    transitive verb
    Inflected Form(s):
    nonplussed also nonplused -ˈpləst ; nonplus

  3. Vocabulary FAIL. I wonder what I was thinking of? Hmm… anyway – nonplussed has disappeared from the text.

  4. Michael Gerety

    Fascinating work. Being completely outside the field allows me to get super simple. Are people who startle more easily prone to become afraid more easily? I know fear can be complex but I’ve observed that some people are more fearful than others.
    The actions that I see coming out of the US government look like behaviors based on fear. ‘Be afraid’ is the message coming from at least some of the press and leadership.
    Are some people inherently more fearful than others and can this be manifest in the startle responses?

  5. JerryB

    The conclusions of this study are wayy overreaching the evidence.”
    I can’t help thinking that uncleroadkill is probably the kind of person who blinks a lot.

  6. Spike

    When one of these studies that links biology to political and/or religious POV can explain all of us who have changed our POVs over time (as in formerly liberal now libertarian and formerly theist, now atheist, for example) -then- I’ll think they’re getting somewhere.

  7. John

    There is another thing that a strong or weak reaction to shocking material can be used to identify — psychopaths. From the article Psychopaths Among Us by Robert Hercz (http://www.hare.org/links/saturday.html) concerning research by Dr. Robert Hare (from Dr. Hare’s web site):

    “In another Hare study, groups of letters were flashed to volunteers. Some of them were nonsense, some formed real words. The subject’s job was to press a button whenever he recognized a real word, while Hare recorded response time and brain activity. Non-psychopaths respond faster and display more brain activity when processing emotionally loaded words such as ‘rape’ or ‘cancer’ than when they see neutral words such as ‘tree.’ With psychopaths, Hare found no difference. To them, ‘rape’ and ‘tree’ have the same emotional impact — none.”

    Considering Hare’s research along side that described in the Discover Magazine article Whose Life Would You Save? (http://discovermagazine.com/2004/apr/whose-life-would-you-save/) strongly suggests that a diminished emotional response to shocking material is also a sign of moral detachment and what psychopaths and narcissists clearly show is that rather than being a good thing, it’s a very bad thing to have a diminished emotional reaction to moral decisions.


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