Left-leaning liberals

WHEN the French legislative assembly met for the first time, in October 1791, it organised itself in such a way that conservative members sat to the right and liberals sat to the left. Over the years, this arrangement became a metaphor for political views, with liberals being considered on the left of the political spectrum and conservatives being on the right. It seems, though, that these terms may be more than mere metaphor, for a study by Daniel Oppenheimer and Thomas Trail of Princeton University suggests that leaning left physically may cause an individual to lean that way mentally, too.

That metaphors can reflect real behaviour is well known. Social interactions that are friendly are often described as “warm” and past experiments have shown that if people are given a warm drink they are more likely to behave towards others in a warm manner than if they are given a cold drink. Similarly, experiments exploring the concepts of “up=good” and “down=bad”, in which people are asked to move objects either upwards or downwards on a shelf, reveal that “up” primes people to be positive and “down” primes them to be negative. With these sorts of studies in mind, Dr Oppenheimer and Dr Trail set out to determine if orienting people towards their left or right sides shifts their political opinions.

In their first experiment they asked 112 people to squeeze a hand-grip for five seconds and then asked them “To what extent do you agree with Democrats on political issues?” and “To what extent do you agree with Republicans on political issues?” Both questions were answered on an eight-point scale, with one indicating strong disagreement and eight indicating strong agreement. Follow-up questions collected information on handedness, age and political affiliation.

Dr Oppenheimer and Dr Trail report in Social Cognition that participants who were told to squeeze the grip with their left hand scored an average of 5.6 when asked if they agreed with Democrats and that those who were told to squeeze with their right hands scored 5.2, a statistically significant difference. Those who squeezed with their right hands scored 3.6 in their agreement with Republicans while those who squeezed with their left hands scored 3.4, a non-significant difference.

Since the majority of their volunteers were right-handed, Dr Oppenheimer and Dr Trail wondered if asking people to squeeze with their right hands was having less of an effect on their decisions, since they were already used to performing actions with this dominant hand. The two researchers therefore devised a second experiment. In this, a total of 31 volunteers sat in chairs that had been subtly tinkered with to lean either slightly left or slightly right. While seated, these volunteers were asked the same questions as those put to the hand-grip squeezers.

The results were similar to those for the hand grips. People who sat leaning to the left agreed with the Democrats more than those who sat leaning to the right. They averaged 6.6, as against 5.2. Once again, too, the scores for agreement with the Republicans (3.3 against 2.6) were not significantly different.

Whether the fact that only leftist tendencies were affected by grip and posture reflects a general wishy-washiness of leftist thinking, with conservative thoughts being less flexible, or that the volunteers were significantly pro-Democrat in the first place, or something else, is unclear. According to Dr Oppenheimer, however, these findings add to the body of literature which indicates that voter behaviour is irrational and that factors totally unrelated to politics affect the outcomes of elections.