At Yale, we conducted an
experiment to turn conservatives into liberals. The results say a lot about our
political divisions.
By John Bargh
November 22, 2017
When my daughter was growing
up, she often wanted to rush off to do fun things with her friends — get into
the water at the beach, ride off on her bike — without taking the proper safety
precautions first. I’d have to stop her in her tracks to first put on the
sunscreen, or her bike helmet and knee pads, with her standing there
impatiently. “Safety first, fun second,” was my mantra.
Keeping ourselves and our
loved ones safe from harm is perhaps our strongest human motivation, deeply
embedded in our very DNA. It is so deep and important that it influences much
of what we think and do, maybe more than we might expect. For example, over a
decade now of research in political psychology consistently shows that how
physically threatened or fearful a person feels is a key factor — although
clearly not the only one — in whether he or she holds conservative or
liberal attitudes.
Conservatives, it turns out,
react more strongly to physical threat than liberals do. In fact, their greater
concern with physical safety seems to be determined early in life: In one
University of California study, the more fear a 4-year-old showed in a
laboratory situation, the more conservative his or her political attitudes were
found to be 20 years later. Brain imaging studies have even shown that the
fear center of the brain, the amygdala, is actually larger in conservatives
than in liberals. And many other laboratory studies have found that when adult
liberals experienced physical threat, their political and social attitudes
became more conservative (temporarily, of course). But no one had ever turned
conservatives into liberals.
Until we did.
In a new study to appear in a
forthcoming issue of the European Journal of Social Psychology, my
colleagues Jaime Napier, Julie Huang and Andy Vonasch and I asked 300 U.S.
residents in an online survey their opinions on several contemporary issues
such as gay rights, abortion, feminism and immigration, as well as social
change in general. The group was two-thirds female, about
three-quarters white, with an average age of 35. Thirty-percent of
the participants self-identified as Republican, and the rest as Democrat.
But before they answered the
survey questions, we had them engage in an intense imagination exercise. They
were asked to close their eyes and richly imagine being visited by a genie who
granted them a superpower. For half of our participants, this superpower was to
be able to fly, under one’s own power. For the other half, it was to be
completely physically safe, invulnerable to any harm.
If they had just imagined
being able to fly, their responses to the social attitude survey showed the
usual clear difference between Republicans and Democrats — the former endorsed
more conservative positions on social issues and were also more resistant to
social change in general.
But if they had instead just
imagined being completely physically safe, the Republicans became significantly
more liberal — their positions on social attitudes were much more like the
Democratic respondents. And on the issue of social change in general, the
Republicans’ attitudes were now indistinguishable from the Democrats. Imagining
being completely safe from physical harm had done what no experiment had done
before — it had turned conservatives into liberals.
In both instances, we had
manipulated a deeper underlying reason for political attitudes, the strength of
the basic motivation of safety and survival. The boiling water of our social
and political attitudes, it seems, can be turned up or down by changing how
physically safe we feel.
This is why it makes sense
that liberal politicians intuitively portray danger as manageable — recall
FDR’s famous Great Depression era reassurance of “nothing to fear but fear
itself,” echoed decades later in Barack Obama’s final State of the Union address
— and why President Trump and other Republican politicians are instead likely
to emphasize the dangers of terrorism and immigration, relying on fear as a
motivator to gain votes.
In fact, anti-immigration
attitudes are also linked directly to the underlying basic drive for physical
safety. For centuries, arch-conservative leaders have often referred to
scapegoated minority groups as “germs” or “bacteria” that seek to invade and
destroy their country from within. President Trump is an acknowledged germaphobe,
and he has a penchant for describing people — not only immigrants but political
opponents and former Miss Universe contestants — as “disgusting.”
“Immigrants are like viruses”
is a powerful metaphor, because in comparing immigrants entering a country to
germs entering a human body, it speaks directly to our powerful innate
motivation to avoid contamination and disease. Until very recently in human
history, not only did we not have antibiotics, we did not even know how
infections occurred or diseases transmitted, and cuts and open wounds were
quite dangerous. (In the American Civil War, for example, 60 out of every 1,000
soldiers died not by bullets or bayonets, but by infections.)
Therefore, we reasoned, making
people feel safer about a dangerous flu virus should serve to calm their fears
about immigrants — and making them feel more threatened by the flu virus should
cause them to be more against immigration than they were before. In a 2011
study, my colleagues and I showed just that. First, we reminded our nationwide
sample of liberals and conservatives about the threat of the flu virus (during
the H1N1 epidemic), and then measured their attitudes toward immigration.
Afterward we simply asked them
if they’d already gotten their flu shot or not. It turned out that those who
had not gotten a flu shot (feeling threatened) expressed more negative attitudes
toward immigration, while those who had received the vaccination
(feeling safe) had more positive attitudes about immigration.
In another study, using hand
sanitizer after being warned about the flu virus had the same effect on
immigration attitudes as had being vaccinated. A simple squirt of
Purell after we had raised the threat of the flu had changed their
minds. It made them feel safe from the dangerous virus, and this made them feel
socially safe from immigrants as well.
Our study findings may have a
silver lining. Here’s how:
All of us believe that our
social and political attitudes are based on good reasons and reflect our
important values. But we also need to recognize how much they can be influenced
subconsciously by our most basic, powerful motivations for safety and survival.
Politicians on both sides of the aisle know this already and attempt to
manipulate our votes and party allegiances by appealing to these potent
feelings of fear and of safety.
Instead of allowing our
strings to be pulled so easily by others, we can become more conscious of what
drives us and work harder to base our opinions on factual knowledge about the
issues, including information from outside our media echo chambers. Yes, our
views can harden given the right environment, but our work shows that they are
actually easier to change than we might think.
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