It's the biology, stupid
Nell Greenfieldboyce reports on NPR: John Hibbing, a researcher at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has been studying whether people's political beliefs might be linked to biological traits such as their startle reflex.
He says traditionally, political scientists have assumed that social influences are the main determinant of people's voting patterns. ...
Hibbing and his colleagues found that they could predict what a person's political beliefs would be based on how strongly the person's body responded to the alarming images and sounds, according to a report in the journal Science.
"Those people who seemed to have a stronger reaction to threat were more likely to favor things like military spending, the death penalty, the Patriot Act," says Hibbing. -- Could Political Views Be Driven By Biology? : NPR
Cool picture of the spider on a woman's face.