Age 45 is the rough average of when most people have drifted far enough right to no longer be considered liberal. The rightward drift slowed down past age 45, but did not stop. Top executives are increasingly clustering with each other on the basis of political party. There are two Americas, and age is the divider People become more conservative by about 45 years old Credit: Matt Chase. Sections Economics Collections Politics. Most statements were what you would expect: Republicans, for instance, usually favor increasing defense spending, and Democrats generally support expanding Medicare.
But some statements were surprising, such as a conservative expressing a pro-choice position or a liberal arguing for invading Iran. Haas put 58 people with diverse political views in a brain scanner. On each trial, participants were asked whether it was good or bad that a candidate held a position on a particular issue and not whether they personally agreed or disagreed with it.
Framing the task that way allowed the researchers to look at neural processing as a function of whether the information was expected or unexpected—what they termed congruent or incongruent. Liberals proved more attentive to incongruent information, especially for Democratic candidates. When they encountered such a position, it took them longer to make a decision about whether it was good or bad. How do out-of-the-ordinary positions affect later voting?
Haas suspects that engaging more with such information might make voters more likely to punish candidates for it later. Motivated reasoning, in which people work hard to justify their opinions or decisions, even in the face of conflicting evidence, has been a popular topic in political neuroscience because there is a lot of it going around.
While partisanship plays a role, motivated reasoning goes deeper than that. Just as most of us like to think we are good-hearted human beings, people generally prefer to believe that the society they live in is desirable, fair and legitimate. Nam and her colleagues set out to understand which brain areas govern the affective processes that underlie system justification. They found that the volume of gray matter in the amygdala is linked to the tendency to perceive the social system as legitimate and desirable.
In short, we derive our identities from both our individual characteristics, such as being a parent, and our group memberships, such as being a New Yorker or an American.
These affiliations serve multiple social goals: they feed our need to belong and desire for closure and predictability, and they endorse our moral values. And our brain represents them much as it does other forms of social identity. Among other things, partisan identity clouds memory. Americans are now more likely to be socially liberal than conservative for the first time since Gallup started polling the question in , the pollster reported Thursday, reflecting a broader trend of Americans becoming increasingly liberal on social issues over the past decade—though a far higher share of Americans still hold fiscally conservative views.
Between and , social conservatives had a point advantage over social liberals on average, Gallup notes, which then narrowed to a single-digit difference starting in The rise in social liberalism has been driven by Democrats who are identifying more as socially liberal than conservative, Gallup notes, along with college graduates increasingly identifying as socially liberal. Independents, meanwhile, are predominantly moderate in their ideological views, which is where leaders seeking bipartisan support or hoping to unite the country may need to pitch their policy proposals.
Learn more about how the Gallup Poll Social Series works. Results for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted in with a random sample of 18, adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U. All reported margins of sampling error include computed design effects for weighting.
Landline and cellular telephone numbers are selected using random-digit-dial methods. Search, examine, compare and export nearly a century of primary data.
Subscribe to the Gallup News brief and real time alerts.
0コメント