16 Reasons Why Surgeons Are Conservatives

Neurosurgeon Ben Carson, one of the leading candidates for President, is also one of the most conservative candidates. But among his surgeon colleagues, Dr. Carson is pretty main stream.

Why are surgeons seemingly more conservative than their general medicine colleagues? Is there something about a “liberal” or “conservative” mind that causes medical students to self-select towards particular areas of medicine?

The web site ProCon.org found 16 peer-reviewed studies which seem to show that liberals and conservatives have different brain structures, different physiological responses to stimuli, and activate different neural mechanisms when confronted with similar situations.

Other studies measuring campaign contributions from physicians point to demographics. There are more females than males choosing, for example, general medicine and women contribute more to liberal politicians. Second, physicians in the for-profit healthcare world are more conservative than employee surgeons in not-for-profit healthcare systems.

So, here are the 16 differences between conservative and liberals that emerged from these studies.

1. Conservatives spend more time looking at unpleasant images while liberals spend more time looking at pleasant images.

One study found evidence that individual-level variation in people’s physiological and attentional responses to aversive (unpleasant) and appetitive (pleasing) stimuli are correlated with broad political orientations. Specifically, it found that greater orientation to aversive stimuli tends to be associated with conservatives and greater orientation to appetitive stimuli with liberal inclinations.

2. Reliance on quick, efficient, and “low effort” thought processes yielded conservative ideologies, while effortful and deliberate reasoning yielded liberal ideologies.

When effortful, deliberate responding is disrupted or disengaged, thought processes become quick and efficient; these conditions promote conservative ideology… “Low-effort thought might promote political conservatism because its concepts are easier to process, and processing fluency increases attitude endorsement.”

3. People who react strongly to disgusting images are more likely to self-identify as conservative.

“People who believe they would be bothered by a range of hypothetical disgusting situations display an increased likelihood of displaying right-of-center rather than left-of-center political orientations… Individuals with marked involuntary physiological responses to disgusting images [measured by change in mean skin conductance]…are more likely to self-identify as conservative and, especially, to oppose gay marriage than are individuals with more muted physiological responses to the same images.”

4. Liberals have more tolerance to uncertainty (bigger anterior cingulate cortex), and conservatives have more sensitivity to fear (bigger right amygdala).

Using structural MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), researchers found that greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), whereas greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala…

The amygdala is where we process fear. The bigger the amygdala the more sensitivity to fear, which suggests that individuals with larger amygdala are more inclined to integrate conservative views into their belief systems. The anterior cingulate cortex is where we monitor uncertainty and conflicts.

Thus it is conceivable that individuals with a larger ACC have a higher capacity to tolerate uncertainty and conflicts, allowing them to accept more liberal views.

5. Conservatives have stronger motivations than liberals to preserve purity and cleanliness.

“Reminders of physical purity influence specific moral judgments regarding behaviors in the sexual domain as well as broad political attitudes. Environmental reminders of physical cleanliness shifted participants’ attitudes toward the conservative end of the political spectrum and altered their specific attitudes toward various moral acts.

Conservatives show a stronger tendency to feel disgust and find specific violations of sexual purity more offensive… When taken together, these two sets of results point to the possibility that political orientation may be, in some measure, shaped by the strength of an individual’s motivation to avoid physical contamination and that resulting vigilance for threats to purity may serve to reinforce a politically conservative stance toward the world.”

6. Liberals are more likely than conservatives to shift their attention in the direction of another person’s gaze.

Conservatives tend to be more supportive of individualism and less likely to be influenced by others. Researchers found “standard gaze cuing effects across all subjects, but systematic differences in these effects by political temperament. Liberals exhibit a very large gaze cuing effect while conservatives show no such effect at various SOAs [stimulus onset asynchrony]…”

7. Republicans are more likely than Democrats to interpret faces as threatening and expressing dominant emotions, while Democrats show greater emotional distress and lower life satisfaction.

Republican sympathizers were more likely to interpret the faces as signaling a threatening expression as compared to Democrat sympathizers. Republican sympathizers were more likely to perceive the faces as expressing dominant emotions than were Democrat sympathizers.

Democrat sympathizers showed greater psychological distress, more frequent histories of adverse life events such as interpersonal victimization experiences, fewer and less satisfying relationships, and lower perceptions of the trustworthiness of peers and intimate affiliates.

8. Conservatives have greater sensitivity to negative stimuli.

Conservatives are sensitive to avoidance motivation, which produces ‘inhibition’ responses manifested in greater rigidity. Self-regulation appears to provide a useful perspective for understanding how one’s political views may affect categorization processes and, more broadly, the association between political conservatism and rigidity.

9. Conservatives have more activity in their dorsolateral prefrontal cortices, the part of the brain that activates for complex social evaluations.

This could be explained by claiming that conservative statements require more complex social judgments marked by greater cognitive dissonance between self-interest and sense of fairness.

The representation of complex political beliefs relies on three fundamental dimensions, each reflected in distinctive patterns of neural activation:

• The degree of individualism of political beliefs was linearly associated with activation in the medial PFC [prefrontal cortex] and TPJ [temporoparietal junction]
• The degree of conservatism with activation in the DLPFC
• The degree of radicalism with activation in the ventral striatum and PC/P [posterior cingulate/precuneus]

Findings support the interpretation that the political belief system depends on a set of social cognitive processes including those that enable a person to judge themselves and other people, make decisions in ambivalent social situations, and comprehend motivational and emotional states.”

10. Conservatism is focused on preventing negative outcomes, while liberalism is focused on advancing positive outcomes.

Liberals seek to provide for group members’ welfare while conservatives want to protect the group from harm. These reflect the fundamental psychological distinction between approach and avoidance motivation. Conservatism is avoidance based; it is focused on preventing negative outcomes (e.g., societal losses) and seeks to regulate society via inhibition (restraints) in the interests of social order. Liberalism is approach based; it is focused on advancing positive outcomes (e.g., societal gains) and seeks to regulate society via activation (interventions) in the interests of social justice.

11. Genetics influence political attitudes during early adulthood and beyond.

Genetic influences on political attitudes are absent prior to young adulthood. During childhood and adolescence, individual differences in political attitudes are accounted for by a variety of environmental influences. However, in the early 20s, for those who left their parental home, there is evidence of a sizeable genetic influence on political attitudes which remains stable throughout adult life.

12. Conservatives learn better from negative stimuli than from positive stimuli and are more risk avoidant than liberals.

The relations among political ideology, exploratory behavior, and the formation of attitudes toward novel stimuli were explored in one study. Participants played a computer game that required learning whether these stimuli produced positive or negative outcomes. Learning was dependent on participants’ decisions to sample novel stimuli… Political ideology correlated with exploration during the game, with conservatives sampling fewer targets than liberals. Moreover, more conservative individuals exhibited a stronger learning asymmetry, such that they learned negative stimuli better than positive. Conservatives pursued a more avoidant strategy to the game.

13. Individual political attitudes correlate with physiological traits, such as sensitivity to sudden noises and threatening visual images.

Individuals with measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism, and gun control. Individuals with higher physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favor defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism, and the Iraq War. Thus, the degree to which individuals are physiologically responsive to threat appears to indicate the degree to which they advocate policies that protect the existing social structure from both external (outgroup) and internal (norm-violator) threats…

14. Liberals are more open-minded and creative whereas conservatives are more orderly and better organized.

Personality differences between liberals and conservatives are not only on self-report trait measures but also on unobtrusive, nonverbal measures of interaction style and behavioral residue.

15. When faced with a conflict, liberals are more likely than conservatives to alter their habitual response when cues indicate it is necessary.

Greater liberalism is associated with stronger conflict-related anterior cingulate activity, suggesting greater neurocognitive sensitivity to cues for altering a habitual response pattern.

Political orientation reflects individual differences in the functioning of a general mechanism related to cognitive control and self-regulation. Stronger conservatism was associated with less neurocognitive sensitivity to response conflicts. At the behavioral level, conservatives were also more likely to make errors of commission. Although a liberal orientation was associated with better performance on a response-inhibition task, conservatives would presumably perform better on tasks in which a more fixed response style is optimal.

16. Conservatives sleep more soundly and have more mundane dreams, while liberals sleep more restlessly and have a more bizarre, active dream life.

Conservative men sleep longer and better. They recall the fewest dreams, but have the most lucid awareness. Liberal women have the worst quality sleep, recall the greatest number and variety of dreams, and have the most dream references to homosexuality.

The Studies

Thanks to the folks at ProCon.org.  We paraphrased and edited some of the responses and any mistakes are ours. Here is a list of the 16 peer-reviewed studies used by ProCon.org to show how liberals and conservatives are physiologically different:

1. Michael D. Dodd, PhD, Amanda Balzer, PhD, Carly Jacobs, MA, Michael Gruszczynski, MA, Kevin B. Smith, PhD, and John R. Hibbing, PhD, “The Left Rolls with the Good; The Right Confronts the Bad. Physiology and Cognition in Politics, ” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Mar. 5, 2012
2. Scott Eidelman, PhD, Christian S. Crandall, PhD, Jeffrey A. Goodman, PhD, and John C. Blanchar, “Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism, “ Society for Personality and Social Psychology, 2012
3. Kevin Smith, PhD, Douglas Oxley, PhD, Matthew V. Hibbing, PhD, John R. Alford, PhD, and John R. Hibbing, PhD, “Disgust Sensitivity and the Neurophysiology of Left-Right Political Orientations, ” PLOS ONE, Oct. 19, 2011
4. Ryota Kanai, PhD, Tom Feilden, Colin Firth, and Geraint Rees, PhD, “Political Orientations Are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults, ” Current Biology, Apr. 7, 2011
5. Erik G. Helzer and David A. Pizarro, PhD, “Dirty Liberals! Reminders of Physical Cleanliness Influence Moral and Political Attitudes, “ Psychological Science, Mar. 18, 2011
6. Michael D. Dodd, PhD, John R. Hibbing, PhD, and Kevin B. Smith, PhD, “The Politics of Attention: Gaze Cuing Effects Are Moderated by Political Temperament, “ Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, Jan. 2011
7. Jacob M. Vigil, PhD, “Political Leanings Vary with Facial Expression Processing and Psychosocial Functioning, ” Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 2010
8. Mindi S. Rock, PhD, and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, PhD, “Where Do We Draw Our Lines? Politics, Rigidity, and the Role of Self-Regulation, ” Social Psychological and Personality Science, Jan. 2010
9. Giovanna Zamboni, MD, Marta Gozzi, PhD, Frank Krueger, PhD, Jean-René Duhamel, PhD, Angela Sirigu, PhD, and Jordan Grafman, PhD, “Individualism, Conservatism, and Radicalism As Criteria for Processing Political Beliefs: A Parametric fMRI Study, ” Social Neuroscience, Sep. 2009
10. Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, PhD, “To Provide or Protect: Motivational Bases of Political Liberalism and Conservatism, ” Psychological Inquiry: An International Journal for the Advancement of Psychological Theory, Aug. 2009
11. Peter K. Hatemi, PhD, Carolyn L. Funk, PhD, Sarah E. Medland, PhD, Hermine M. Maes, PhD, Judy L. Silberg, PhD, Nicholas G. Martin, PhD, and Lindon J. Eaves, PhD, DSc, “Genetic and Environmental Transmission of Political Attitudes Over a Life Time, ” The Journal of Politics, July 21, 2009
12. Natalie J. Shook, PhD, and Russell H. Fazio, PhD, “Political Ideology, Exploration of Novel Stimuli, and Attitude Formation, “ Experimental Social Psychology, Apr. 3, 2009
13. Douglas R. Oxley, PhD, Kevin B. Smith, PhD, John R. Alford, PhD, Matthew V. Hibbing, PhD, Jennifer L. Miller, Mario Scalora, PhD, Peter K. Hatemi, PhD, and John R. Hibbing, PhD, “Political Attitudes Vary with Physiological Traits, ” Science, Sep. 19, 2008
14. Dana R. Carney, PhD, John T. Jost, PhD, Samuel D. Gosling, PhD, and Jeff Potter, “The Secret Lives of Liberals and Conservatives: Personality Profiles, Interaction Styles, and the Things They Leave Behind, “ International Society of Political Psychology, Oct. 23, 2008
15. David M. Amodio, PhD, John T. Jost, PhD, Sarah L. Master, PhD, and Cindy M. Yee, PhD, “Neurocognitive Correlates of Liberalism and Conservatism, “ Nature Neuroscience, Sep. 9, 2007
16. Kelly Bulkeley, PhD, “Sleep and Dream patterns of Political Liberals and Conservatives, ” Dreaming, 2006