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Inspired Life <http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/>

At Yale, we conducted an experiment to turn conservatives into

liberals. The results say a lot about our political divisions.

By John Bargh By John Bargh Inspired Life

<http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/>
November 22 //

(Getty Images)

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. Id 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.

/[A political scientist has discovered a surprising way to increase

voter turnout. It starts in childhood.]/
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2017/08/17/a-political-
scientist-has-discovered-a-surprising-way-to-increase-voter-turnout-it-starts-in-
childhood/>
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 ones 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.

/[Stanford researchers: The secret to overcoming the opioid crisis may

lie partly in the mind]/
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2017/09/12/stanford-
researchers-the-secret-to-overcoming-the-opioid-crisis-may-be-all-in-the-mind/>

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 FDRs famous Great Depression era
reassurance of nothing to fear but fear itself, echoed decades later
in Barack Obamas 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 theyd 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.

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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. Heres 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.

/John Bargh is a professor of social psychology at Yale University and

the author of Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We
Do
<https://www.amazon.com/Before-You-Know-Unconscious-Reasons/dp/1501101218>/

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