the science is settled; conservatives have a "negativity bias"

[star seed 7]

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/07/biology-ideology-john-hibbing-negativity-bias

[john "teach me how to" dougie]

I always knew conservatives were happier people.

[nicname]

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/07/biology-ideology-john-hibbing-negativity-bias

Neat article, I wish it went into more detail about liberal proclivities.

I have issue with this quote,

This research consistently finds that conservatism is positively associated with heightened epistemic concerns for order, structure, closure, certainty, consistency, simplicity, and familiarity, as well as existential concerns such as perceptions of danger, sensitivity to threat, and death anxiety.

The bolded I find to be applicable to both hard-line rightists and leftists. In my opinion, liberals in most instances believe they have the best solution to most problems, and feel that solution should be applied universally, at least within national boundaries, be it social or economic. Conservatives are similar, but with usually opposite beliefs with regard to social issues. Conservatives don't seem to fall in line here in economic terms.

It's an interesting article. One that makes me look back at the change of the political stratosphere throughout the history of the U.S. I feel like the early years of this country were populated by people with a large faith in self-reliance and self-preservation. Independent, achievers. As some achieve, and to be honest, impose their will with advantages on others, the playing field becomes less level. Then you have the rise of liberals (in the modern sense), those who (in a nutshell) look out for those less fortunate. Some of these come from the aforementioned class, but others of the privileged class. It's those of the privileged class who seem to have all the solutions for everyone else. It's they who feel they know what's best for others, which is where the stereotyping of elitest comes from.

[K-S-U-Wildcats!]

The occasion of this revelation is a paper by John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska and his colleagues, arguing that political conservatives have a "negativity bias," meaning that they are physiologically more attuned to negative (threatening, disgusting) stimuli in their environments. (The paper can be read for free here.) In the process, Hibbing et al. marshal a large body of evidence, including their own experiments using eye trackers and other devices to measure the involuntary responses of political partisans to different types of images. One finding? That conservatives respond much more rapidly to threatening and aversive stimuli (for instance, images of "a very large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody face, and an open wound with maggots in it," as one of their papers put it).

So, in other words, millions of dollars were spent on a study concluding that conservatives are more responsible people. We recognize and react to warning signs more quickly like, say, an 18 trillion dollar debt growing at about a trillion/year, or an unmitigated flood of illegal immigrants glomming onto an already unsustainable welfare system.