Politics “ignites” the spirits. Is it because our political leanings are linked to our own physiology? This has been determined by a team of researchers from the University of Aarhus (Denmark) who, analyzing what they call “partisan bias” , have discovered that our political affiliations are rooted in our own emotions and physiology, regardless of the content or program of the party. That is, being from one party or another would be a more emotional decision than a rational one.
The researchers wanted to find out if leaning towards one party or the other has a more intuitive origin than we think. Thus, the scientists carried out an experiment that measured the activity of the sympathetic nervous system (responsible for affective arousal) as well as several electrodes, including one on the index finger to better understand the physiological responses of a group of volunteers while observing images of logos of matches. The results revealed that participants who felt they were part of a certain match had a measurable physical reaction when they presented the image of the match in question.
“ It is difficult to measure feelings, as they often involve a number of unconscious factors, but by the use of electrodes attached to the skin, we can measure the physiological reactions of the body and therefore determine the affective reactions of a person – independently whether the person is aware of the reaction or not ”, clarifies Michael Bang Peterson, leader of the study.
In a second part of the study, the experts showed the volunteers eight political proposals on the left side of a screen and another eight proposals on the right side. However, “we found that the subjects who had a physiological reaction during the first part of the study showed greater partisan bias in the second part. For example, a large number of subjects who said they identified with the left-wing party tended to be sympathetic towards the party’s proposals. However, the surprising finding was only those who were shown the logo of the party next to the proposals, they showed a strong physiological response towards the proposals of their own party but not without the logo ”, explains Peterson to the magazine PloS One where the study was published.
Thus, the physical reactions of the body were those that determined the degree of bias of the participants, showing that our partiality apparently derives from instinctive and non-rational emotional reactions.
“Our results suggest that not all people are equally influenced by the person who presents the best argument. Affective reactions with party candidates will influence the degree of their agreement with the proposals advocated by specific political parties – regardless of the quality. of the present arguments ”, concludes Peterson.
Do you know where the word politics comes from?
The etymology of the word political we have leads us to the Latin “politicus” and from here to the ancient Greek “πολιτικός” (“politikós”), which means “of the citizens” or “of the State”. The use of the term gained great popularity in the 5th century BC, when Aristotle developed precisely his work called “Politics”.
