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Is "Left" Vs. "Right" Hard-coded Into Your Brain?
New submitter kyjellyfish writes "Research published in the journal PLOS ONE, suggests that your parents 'Left
or 'Right' party affiliations are not the only factor at work shaping a person's political identity. Differences in opinion between 'Lefties' and 'Righties' may reflect specific physiological processes. In research performed over 10 years ago, brain scans showed that London cab drivers' gray matter grew larger to help them store a mental map of the city."
From the article: "Other scans have shown that brain regions associated with risk and uncertainty, such as the fear-processing amygdala, differ in structure in liberals and conservatives. And different architecture means different behavior. Liberals tend to seek out novelty and uncertainty, while conservatives exhibit strong changes in attitude to threatening situations. The former are more willing to accept risk, while the latter tends to have more intense physical reactions to threatening stimuli."
Conservatives need guns because it gives them some sense of power and control. Much like a person deathly afraid of spiders grabs a shoe if they see a suspicious shadow. A liberal is more likely to understand and appreciate the spider.
Learn to love Alaska
Self-congratulating idiots, you mean.
It's funny, I'm surrounded by mostly conservatives, and some (maybe most) don't object to the "universal background checks" so much as they object to what it'll really be.
Conservatism is the politics of fear. What you describe is typical. They're not opposed to what's actually being proposed, they are opposed to where they fear it might lead. Their imaginations always follow the worst case imaginable, even if it's improbable, and assume that's what will be.