New research casts doubt on the theory that politically conservative people are generally more sensitive to negative and threatening information than liberals. While previous studies have indicated that conservatives have stronger responses to negative stimuli, the new research provides evidence that whether conservatives are more or less sensitive to threats is dependent on the context.

The findings appear in the British Journal of Psychology.

“For several decades, the dominant narrative has been that political conservatives are generally more sensitive to negative information (i.e. more fearful or threat-sensitive) than liberals. Conservatives are also perceived to be less open-minded, less exploratory and more cautious. As a consequence, conservatives tend to form more negative attitudes than liberals,” said study author Michael Edem Fiagbenu, a doctoral researcher at Friedrich Schiller University of Jena in Germany.

“However, most of the past research, explicitly or implicitly, used mostly physically threatening stimuli (e.g., terrorism, crime or food) to test the relationship between political views and sensitivity to negative information. We were therefore keen on verifying these past findings. Specifically, we asked ourselves: how would conservatives and liberals explore and form attitudes in a financially threatening context.”

“To examine this question, we compared conservatives’ and liberals’ exploratory behavior and attitude formation in two laboratory games. We were interested in how conservatives and liberals would explore and form attitudes in both contexts,” Fiagbenu explained.

“That is, in both contexts, will conservatives deploy a more cautious exploratory behaviour and consequently, form more negative attitudes than liberals, or would conservatives’ and liberals’ exploratory behavior and attitude formation differ depending on the game context?”

In the study, 240 undergraduates were randomly assigned to play one of two computer games: BeanFest or StockFest. The games provided the participants with the opportunity to win a small amount of money depending on their success.

In the BeanFest game, participants interacted with a virtual 2-D world filled with “beans” that varied in shape and number of speckles. The participants were required to select a bean, which then resulted in either gaining or losing points. The task was framed as a survival game in which the participants gained energy from eating good beans and lost energy by eating bad beans. If their points dropped the zero, they “died.”

After completing dozens of rounds, the participants were given a survey which asked them to identify the good and bad beans.

The StockFest game was nearly identical to the BeanFest game, except the “beans” were now referred to as “stocks” and the game was reframed as virtual stock market. If their points dropped the zero, they went bankrupt.

In line with previous research, Fiagbenu and his colleagues found that conservative participants tended to adopt a more cautious strategy in the BeanFest game. In other words, conservatives selected a smaller variety of beans to avoid unknown consequences while liberals explored their options more. Consequently, conservatives were more likely to misidentify beans as bad in the post-game survey, demonstrating a negativity bias.

But the situation was reversed in the StockFest game — liberal participants tended to adopt a more cautious strategy than conservatives and were more likely to display a negativity bias.

“Our findings suggest that conservatives are no more fearful or threat-sensitive than liberals. Rather, conservatives and liberals may be equally sensitive to negative information, but in different domains or contexts,” Fiagbenu told PsyPost.

“Thus, although we did not test this in our study, we surmise that it is possible that the psychological mechanisms responsible for exploration and negative attitude formation are similar for conservatives and liberals but these processes are triggered by qualitatively different kinds of negative environmental stimuli.”

But the study — like all research — includes some limitations.

“One limitation is that there are perhaps several reasons why conservatives and liberals behaved differently in the BeanFest and StockFest game. However, our research was not designed to probe into any of these mechanisms. Thus, it would be interesting for future studies to look into the broader question of how environment context influences their different behaviour patterns,” Fiagbenu said.

“Also, we only used two different negative contexts in a laboratory, out of perhaps myriad other negative stimuli in the natural world. It would be useful for future studies to include as many negative stimuli as possible in order to properly examine how conservatives and liberals react to different kinds of negative stimuli.”

“Finally, another possibility would be that if researchers can construct ‘neutral’ stimuli, that is, stimuli which are objectively neither negative nor positive for conservatives and liberals, then we should be also to properly test how they react under these neutral contexts. Of course, the success of this approach would depend on how researchers define and construct and sample these so-called ideologically neutral stimuli,” Fiagbenu noted.

The study, “Of deadly beans and risky stocks: Political ideology and attitude formation via exploration depend on the nature of the attitude stimuli“, was authored by Michael Edem Fiagbenu, Jutta Proch, and Thomas Kessler.