A team of researchers from the Universities of Nebraska in Omaha, Nebraska-Lincoln and Rice University in Texas (USA) has developed a study that concludes that hormones, specifically the stress hormone, can influence our voting behavior . Their conclusions have been published in the journal Physiology & Behavior .
In this study, the researchers set out to determine whether cortisol levels, what we commonly call stress hormone, affect the electoral voting process. Thus, they took saliva samples from 105 participations that described themselves as disinterested in politics, very conservative or very liberal.
Analysis of the data revealed that participants who had low cortisol levels in the afternoon were more likely to vote , while those with high cortisol levels were much less likely.
"Politics and political participation are inherently stressful activities and our study confirms the hypothesis that a high level of cortisol causes not only a change in social, cognitive and emotional processes, but also in our voting behavior", says Jeff French, leader of the study.
"The key takeaway from this research, I think, is that while social scientists have spent decades trying to predict voting behavior based on demographic information, there is a lot to learn about biological differences," concludes French.
