A recent study carried out by evolutionary psychologist, Colin Holbrook, showed that when it comes to white people and black men they found a strong link between their size and how threatened they felt by them. But, when the same test was carried out on conservatives and Syrians, the opposite was found to be true.
The experiment involved five hundred participants that listened to the story of several Syrian refugees via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk system. As part of the test they were asked to estimate the size of one refugee named Hassan, but were not given any physical description of him. Participants were also asked to estimate the size of another man, called James, but this one was racially ambiguous and had just lost his job rather than his home territory.
While both Hassan and James were described as waking up on a Saturday, brushing their teeth, looking for work, and spending an evening with friends, it seems that they were still perceived quite differently. A pattern that emerged from the results showed that conservatives linked Hassan to terrorism far more than liberals did. The results revealed they would even go so far as to close borders and secretly spy on refugees. Holbrook has dubbed this pattern as being the “Gulliver Effect.”
Holbrook’s theory makes sense when you think about it. Rather than separating conservatives and liberals by their political views he defines them by their worldviews instead. Whereas conservatives tend to be quite “gun-ho” and want to destroy all possible threats that come their way, liberals tend to be a little more cautious and more willing to negotiate. To give you an un-American perspective, the experiment was also carried out in Spain, where thousands of more refugees have been welcomed than in the US. And, unsurprisingly, the same threat perception is formed by the Spanish as it is American.
Holbrook also believes that it’s probable that one’s political ideology is genetically ingrained inside them and that we are pre-programmed in some ways to be wary of threats and respond in a particular way. He comments, “We have shown that both liberal and conservative political orientations shape reasoning about both terrorism and the refugee crisis. Ultimately, our research is about more than the link between political orientation, threat-perception, and support for aggression. It is part of a larger program in **Evolutionary Psychology intended to help identify blind spots within our minds that warp our ability to treat others in a rational way.”
**Evolutionary psychology (EP) is a theoretical approach in the social and natural sciences that examines psychological structure from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations – that is, the functional products of natural selection or sexual selection in human evolution. Source Wikipedia.
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