The United States is now fully engaged in its quadrennial (every 4 years) presidential politics frenzy. As Americans, endlessly and fruitlessly, debate people with other political perspectives, it's interesting to learn that people with different political perspectives literally look at the world differently.
Dodd, Balzer, Jacobs, Gruszczynski, Smith, and Hibbing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln published research recently in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B detailing differences in how people with strong politically liberal and politically conservative beliefs tend to interact with the worlds in which they find themselves. The researchers found "greater orientation to aversive stimuli tends to be associated with right-of-centre and greater orientation to appetitive (pleasing) stimuli with left-of-centre political inclinations . . . [during the research collection process] individuals on the right spend a greater amount of time gazing at aversive images while individuals on the left spend a greater amount of time gazing at appetitive images." The researchers conclude that "It appears individuals on the political right are not so much ‘fearful' and ‘vulnerable' as attuned and attentive to the aversive in life . . . the central message of these findings is not that one political orientation is somehow superior to the other but rather that, in light of the connection between location on the political spectrum and physio-cognitive differences, those on the political right and those on the political left may simply experience the world differently."
