I am involved in various conversation groups where ideology, politics, and religion are often discussed. One of the interesting elements that comes up is the consideration that conservatives are much more emotion driven than liberals. Sometimes this idea is used as a type of insult to suggest that conservatives are not being rational in their considerations. However, in this episode, I speak to Dr. Eran Halperin about a differing hypothesis, along with descriptions of some of his research that provides great evidence that this is probably not be a correct assumption, and even that the assumption is actually backwards. The interview is focused around his article titled "Are Leftists More Emotion-Driven Than Rightists? The Interactive Influence of Ideology and Emotions on Support for Policies." The abstract is provided below. Thank you so much for listening.

Abstract of the Article

Although emotions and ideology are important factors guiding policy support in conflict, their interactive influence remains unclear. Based on prior findings that ideological leftists’ beliefs are more susceptible to change than rightists’ beliefs, we tested a somewhat counterintuitive extension that leftists would be more susceptible to influence by their emotional reactions than rightists. In three laboratory studies, inducing positive and negative emotions affected Jewish–Israeli leftists’, but not rightists’, support for conciliatory policies toward an adversarial (Studies 1 and 3) and a non-adversarial (Study 2) outgroup. Three additional field studies showed that positive and negative emotions were related to leftists’, but not rightists’, policy support in positive as well as highly negative conflict-related contexts, among both Jewish (Studies 4 and 5) and Palestinian (Study 6) citizens of Israel. Across different conflicts, emotions, conflict-related contexts, and even populations, leftists’ policy support changed in accordance with emotional reactions more than rightists’ policy support.