The purpose of the present study was to determine whether political temperament would moderate gaze-cuing effects, on the logic that those on the political right tend to be more supportive of individual autonomy—and, as such, may be less likely to be influenced by others—than are those on the political left. As would be expected in a task of this type, significant gaze-cuing effects were observed at all SOAs when the data of all participants were collapsed. A more surprising picture emerged, however, when political temperament was taken into account. Specifically, the magnitude of the gaze-cuing effect was much larger for liberals than for conservatives, with conservative participants actually failing to show a statistically significant gaze-cuing effect at any of our SOAs.

One question that remains is why, exactly, conservatives are less susceptible to gaze-cuing effects, relative to liberals? We have argued that conservatives tend to value personal autonomy more so than liberals, making them less likely to be influenced by others and, in turn, less responsive to gaze cues. Other possibilities exist, however, that could account for the present findings. For example, it is possible that the present effects are linked to previous work demonstrating that the magnitude of cuing effects can be reduced or eliminated in individuals who score high on Baron-Cohen et al.’s (2001) ASQQ (Bayliss & Tipper, 2005) and in males relative to females, given that males tend to display more autism-like traits (Bayliss et al., 2005). It stands to reason, therefore, that if conservatives possess more autism-like traits than do liberals, this could account for the present findings. Although participants in the present study did not complete the ASQQ, it is unlikely that the present results are driven solely by autism-like traits given that our conservative sample contained more females and fewer males than our liberal group. Another possibility is that liberals are more empathetic than conservatives and that the present results are moderated by this variable. This would explain why the magnitude of gaze-cuing effects reported here for liberals was larger than is normally observed in a task of this type, but this alone would not account for why conservatives failed to exhibit a gaze-cuing effect. A final possibility is that these results are moderated by trust. Perhaps conservatives are less likely to trust others, meaning that they are also less likely to trust a gaze cue (alternatively, one could argue that conservatives are more likely to trust authority and, as such, were more likely in the present experiment to believe the experimenter’s directive that the gaze cue was uninformative, making it easier to ignore). Further research will be required to delineate between these possibilities.Footnote 3 In any case, it is important to note that gaze-cuing effects are often thought to be attributable to reflexive shifts of attention in response to the gaze cue, meaning that an elimination of the effect in a large group is surprising. This suggests that either a) gaze-cuing effects are less reflexive than has previously been believed or b) certain individuals can moderate the effect of gaze cues via top-down control. It is worth noting that when all of the participant data are collapsed in the present study, significant gaze-cuing effects are observed, the magnitude of which is consistent with previous research. It is likely, therefore, that the factors that moderate gaze-cuing effects would go unnoticed without explicit exploration. Given the present findings, other factors such as social anxiety and cultural norms, which also have the potential to moderate gaze cue effects in a meaningful way, will have to be explored if we are to better understand gaze-cuing effects. Moreover, it is worth noting that the present effects were observed with a schematic face cue, as opposed to a photograph. Although both cue types are commonly used and lead to sizable cuing effects, it will be interesting for future research to determine whether cue type interacts with these other moderating variables.

The present results may also help to explain why gaze-cuing effects have been inconsistently demonstrated at very early SOAs. One of the critical markers of reflexive shifts of attention is that they occur at very early cue–target SOAs. In peripheral-cuing experiments—which are a well-established measure of reflexive attention—participants are often faster to respond to targets appearing at cued locations, even with cue–target SOAs of 50 ms or less (e.g., Jonides, 1981). With gaze cues, however, cuing effects are not always observed at cue–target SOAs of 100 ms or less (e.g., Driver et al., 1999), which would seem inconsistent with the notion that gaze cues produce reflexive shifts of attention in the direction of gaze. In the present experiment, the magnitude of our overall cuing effect at the 100-ms SOA was small (6 ms) and just reached conventional levels of significance (p = .047). When the participants were divided up in terms of political temperament, however, a large cuing effect of 11 ms was observed for liberals at the 100-ms SOA. Given that the magnitude of gaze-cuing effects is smaller at earlier SOAs, it is possible that a group of participants that skews more conservative could mask the gaze-cuing effects being exhibited by other participants.

Finally, the present study has the potential to further extend our understanding of how political attitudinal and behavioral differences emerge in the general population. Political scientists have traditionally accounted for these differences purely in terms of environmental forces (e.g., Lewis-Beck, Jacoby, Norpoth, & Weisberg, 2008) but recent evidence indicates that political orientations may also have some partial basis in biology (Alford, Funk, & Hibbing, 2005; Fowler & Dawes, 2008; Hatemi et al., 2009). Lost in the discussion of a possible connection to biology is the fact that the potential role of cognitive and attentional biases (wherever they come from) has as yet gone unexplored. Conservatives have already been shown to be more sensitive to threatening/disgusting stimuli (Oxley et al., 2008) and have more structured and persistent cognitive styles (Amodio, Jost, Master, & Lee, 2007), meaning that there is a strong likelihood that liberals and conservatives will exhibit cognitive differences across a variety of tasks. The research reported here is an attempt to redress this oversight and, in the process, demonstrate that liberals and conservatives do indeed perform quite differently on a basic, well-established cognitive task. Thus, in addition to providing insight into individual differences in attentional gaze, the correlation identified here between political orientations and gaze cues encourages additional research and, perhaps, a revised conceptualization of the nature of political preferences.