Why does one person become a liberal and another a conservative? As we’ve written, many factors seem to come into play, including genetics, personality and even unnoticed cues from the physical environment. A newly published study shows that, for at least one group of men, lifelong political affiliation was, to a significant degree, a matter of chance. For young men coming of age in the Vietnam draft era, the likelihood they’d be sent to war — as determined by a national lottery — had both a short- and long-term impact on their party identification. Republican-leaning men ... Read More
The Right Face for a Whig
February 28, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
You might not be able to tell a book by its cover, but it seems that more often than not you can guess someone’s political affiliation simply by studying his or her face. At least that’s what Nicholas Rule found when he asked undergraduate research subjects at Tufts University to look at black-and-white photographs of strangers and guess whether they were Democrats or Republicans. Nearly 60 percent of the time they got it right. “That’s not a huge effect,” says Rule, a doctoral student in psychology, “but it is significantly better than chance. You can’t just walk down ... Read More
