Liberals might be more likely than conservatives to check out what you are looking at, according to a study published online November 4 in Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics . Experiments show that people take longer to notice when an object appears if they have first seen a face looking in the other direction. Now a team of psychologists and poli­tical scientists at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln report that whereas liberals do just that, conservatives do not. The researchers asked 72 undergraduates to look at a drawing of a face that looked to the left or right of a computer screen and then press a key when a black dot appeared. Despite being told the face would not predict the dot’s location, liberals took 10 to 20 milliseconds longer--about 5 percent--to notice the dot when the face looked away from it instead of toward it, indicating that they had followed the face’s gaze. Conservatives did not--they took the same amount of time regardless of where the face looked.

Study co-author Kevin Smith says one possible explanation is that “liberals are more sensitive [More]














Source: What Are You Looking At? Conservatives May Be Less Sensitive to Certain Social Cues