Bob CollinsWant to know whether someone is a conservative or a liberal? There’s no longer a need to figure out how to work the question into a conversation (“How about that Obama, eh?”). Just look into the other person’s eyes, a study out of Nebraska says. (LiveScience.com)
People normally respond to “gaze cues,” or the direction that another person is looking, by glancing to see what caught that person’s attention. The new study, to be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, finds that liberals respond much more strongly to such cues than conservatives. The finding is the latest in a series of clues that liberals and conservatives may be subtly different on a biological level, said study researcher Michael Dodd, a psychologist at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
Researchers are suggesting how you react to things around you might indicate your political leanings. Or not.
“I do tend to think that it is more likely that basic cognitive biases influence how you process the world, making you more or less likely to seek out liberal or conservative ideals,” the researcher said.
