Do You Blink or Sweat When Startled? You're a Conservative!

From the Department of Silly Studies:

The researchers asked 46 volunteers about their views on a variety of political issues, including foreign aid, immigration policies, and gun control.

Two months later, they showed the volunteers a series of pictures, which included frightening images interspersed with pictures of a bunny, a bowl of fruit and a happy child while measuring the electrical conductance of the volunteers' skin, which signalled sweating, a characteristic used in polygraphs (lie tests).

They also played a series of sudden noises and monitored the volunteers' eye response, since harder blinks are a reflex response that signal heightened fear.

People who are physiologically highly responsive to threat are likely to advocate policies that protect against threats to the social unit: favouring defence spending, capital punishment, patriotism and the Iraq War.

In contrast, people who are less startled by sudden noises and threatening visual images are more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism and gun control.

Let's not forget that years of drug abuse and personal depravity tend to dull your responses to outside stimuli. That better explains the laid-back response to threats experienced by liberals rather some other mumbo-jumbo.