Reports published in professional academic journals often include eye-glazing technicalities and, when the results of this research are picked up by the popular press, much is lost in translation. We appreciate the media making research accessible to a broad audience, but the often-brief summaries tend to leave a false impression of the central findings. Our aim is to provide a book-length treatment that summarizes the recent research in a detailed but readable fashion.

We did not construct the complex, fascinating, flawed, and infuriating creatures called humans; we just study them. By understanding the human condition, warts and all, we think it might be possible to build and maintain political systems that work better than they currendy do. We know for sure that pretending that humans are something they are not will only lead to frustration and further polarization of the political arena. We are eager to acknowledge the valuable assistance we received in writing this book and in conducting the research that made it possible.

Second, our students throughout the years have shaped our thinking and improved our research dramatically. Jayme comes in for special thanks. She was absolutely indispensable in many roles: Colleagues and administrators at our respective universities, and in particular in the Department of Political Science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, have been wonderfully supportive.

Matthew Hibbing and Jessica Mohatt provided crucial feedback on earlier drafts and saved us from many errors. We thank our colleagues around the world, in a variety of disciplines, who are also engaged in investigations of the sources of political attitudes, sometimes in collaboration with us and sometimes independently.

We enjoy being their fellow travelers. We thank our editor at Roudedge, Michael Kerns, for his support, encouragement, and guidance on this project, as well as his excellent taste in wine. And we thank our agent, Judy Heiblum, for being such an unflagging advocate for this project despite the fact that it happened when she was busy moving to a different continent and having a baby. Mostly, we thank our spouses, a couple of whom Anne Nielsen Hibbing and Kelly Smith were dragooned into reading the entire book and providing critiques, support, and suggestions.

Biographical Statement John R. Together, for the past decade, they have been investigating the biological and deep psychological bases of political orientations. Their research has appeared in leading academic journals, including Science, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and the American Political Science Review, and has been featured in hundreds of stories and segments in popular media outlets.

Chapter 1 Living with the Enemy Democrats: Sweaty, disorderly, offhand, imaginative, tolerant, skillful at give-and-take. Respectable, sober, purposeful, self-righteous, cut-and-dried, boring. Clinton Rossiter, Parties and Politics in America Politics is a blood sport where fights among spectators can be just as ferocious as the blows traded by combatants. Political exchange tends toward the emotional and primal rather than the reasoned and analytical, which is why it must have seemed like a good idea to ABC News in to televise a series of debates between William F.

Both were ideologues — Buckley for the right, Vidal for the left — but ideologues in an educated, patrician, and articulate men-of-letters sort of way. Perhaps they could demonstrate to a mass audience that it was possible for debates between political opponents to employ words that were honest, intellectual, and constructive rather than pejorative, dismissive, and rancorous. That sort of example was desperately needed in the United States in , a time when people who disagreed with the political ideas of other people had picked up an alarming habit of shooting them or beating them senseless.

Buckley and Vidal, then, must have seemed like just the ticket. They were smart and hyper- articulate, and their plummy, East Coast establishment tones made them seem so, well, civilized. Perhaps they could demonstrate a more mature way to deal with political differences. Buckley did not shut up. So much for a civilized exchange of views.

At this point we could cluck our tongues and make highbrow academic noises about the degeneration of political exchange. We could point back to the early days of the American experiment and hold up the dignified Founders as better examples of civil and edifying political debate. Like Buckley and Vidal, Alexander Hamilton and John Adams could be insufferable know-it-alls, intolerant of viewpoints other than their own. President Adams signed into law the Alien and Sedition Acts, making it a crime to say nasty things about the government — a good deal if you are head of that government — and Hamilton engaged in a personal feud with Vice President Aaron Burr so vitriolic it ended with Burr putting a musket ball through him.

As an example of politics putting people on the boil, it is difficult to top the sitting vice president of the United States shooting and killing one of the prime movers and signatories of the Constitution. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, held up in the United States as semi-divine political angels descended from Mount Independence, chucked mud with the best of them. Jefferson, for example, slandered his opponents on the sly.

People take politics seriously. This is why conservatives make Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, and Mark Levin best-selling authors, Rush Limbaugh a wealthy talk-radio titan, and Fox News the most watched oudet on cable television. These sources can be counted on to tell their audiences that conservatives are noble defenders of the good and the just while liberals are stubbornly mugger-headed and oppositional.

Driven by a desire to receive precisely the opposite message, liberals flock to the books of A1 Franken, Michael Moore, and Molly Ivins, and the satire of television comedy like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report has created a massively successful career around the persona of a shallow, jingoistic, uniformed conservative buffoon. If we really wanted the big bucks, we could pen a blistering condemnation of duplicitous, malevolent, degenerate, cretinous liberals. Authors of these popular political screeds rarely seem to invoke — let alone conduct — systematic research.

Ginning up a truckload of demeaning adjectives to unload on one group or another? Sounds like it might be fun as well as profitable. Unfortunately, we are academics, so neither profit nor fun is what interests us most. Besides that, the world does not need another book assuring readers that their political views are laudably correct while those of their political opponents are pathetically, dangerously, and rashly incorrect.

Such books only pander to the worst instincts of those who care deeply about politics, encouraging extremity and discouraging dialogue. In this book we aim to explain why people experience and interpret the political world so very differendy. We want to provide liberals with a better appreciation for the conservative mindset; conservatives with a better appreciation for the liberal mindset; and moderates with a better appreciation for why those closer to the extremes make such a big fuss.

We make no pretense that conservatives and liberals can be led to agree on everything, or even anything. Pretending that some middle-ground nirvana can be reached if only we listen to the other side is counterproductive and a source of endless frustration. We are after smaller but important and much more realistic game. We want liberals and conservatives to understand why they are different from each other and why those differences frequendy seem so unbridgeable.

We recognize what we are up against. Liberals and conservatives are rarely in the mood to understand the other side. This resistance to accepting the other side is something we have encountered in our own professional lives. A few years ago, we published a study showing that liberals and conservatives experience the world differendy and suggested that it might be unproductive and slightiy inaccurate to view either side as irredeemably malevolent — or unremittingly beneficent.

Media coverage of this study led to us to receive numerous emails. Some of these were decidedly caustic, but the most memorable was more plaintive than judgmental. I NEED to hate conservatives. Outrage does not solve challenging issues of governance and it is possible for people to pay close attention to politics without losing emotional control. A more productive, if less viscerally satisfying, response to political difference is to try to understand the source of the views of those who disagree with us so fundamentally.

Doing so does not mean your resolve is weakening or that your fellow travelers should begin to worry about you; making an honest effort to understand the other side is not selling out. In urging each side in the political debate to work harder at accepting the other side, we are not implying that the two poles of the ideological spectrum are mirror images of each other and equally culpable on all matters.

For example, if one side of the political debate is not compromising then the other side must not be compromising either. This is not our position at all. Our pitch is that liberals and conservatives and everyone in between have different orientations to information search and problem solving and therefore contribute to political difficulties and solutions in very different ways. Indeed, one manifestation of this is that the two ideological poles have quite different attitudes toward compromise.

To illustrate the value of entering the mindset of the other side, consider the following. One of our children was given to horrible nightmares. He would cry and shout as monsters circled in his sleep. Instead of telling him how silly and outrageous he was being, they entered his dream world. Blissful sleep — for parents and child alike — soon descended where monsters had lurked only moments before. Dismissing the nightmare world of political adversaries is a wholly ineffective approach to solving political problems. What is lost by making a real effort to enter their world, not with the intention of joining them but to understand the reasons they have come to such different political conclusions?

Maybe if we understand their world we can figure out how to live with people who annoyingly, irritatingly, and persistendy come to political viewpoints so very different from our own. Puzzlement is better than hate. In this book we make the case that political variations are part of an incredible range of differences in the way people respond to the world. Just to give you a brief teaser, it turns out that liberals and conservatives have different tastes not just in politics, but in art, humor, food, life accoutrements, and leisure pursuits; they differ in how they collect information, how they think, and how they view other people and events; they have different neural architecture and display distinct brain waves in certain circumstances; they have different personalities and psychological tendencies; they differ in what their autonomic nervous systems are attuned to; they are aroused by and pay attention to different stimuli; and they might even be different genetically.

At least at the far ends of the ideological spectrum, liberals and conservatives are emotionally, preferentially, psychologically, and biologically distinct. This account is not just based on casual observation or armchair analysis. Science — both social and biological — is our co-pilot. Liberals and conservatives often are reluctant to accept that their differences are rooted in psychology, let alone biology.

Their own political beliefs seem so sensible, rational, and correct that they have difficulty believing that other people, if given full information and protected from nefarious and artificial influences, would arrive at different beliefs. Yet political differences are grounded not in a duplicitous conspiracy or an irrational disregard of logic and truth but rather in variations in our core beings. Conservatives are not duped liberals and liberals are not lazily uninformed conservatives.

A better understanding of the biological and psychological realities of our political opponents makes it possible to recognize that their policy preferences, however misguided to our eyes, are sensible given their different realities. Getting to that point is crucial. We must be a bunch of academic lefties trying to stick it to the right. Or maybe we are traitors to the cause and are out to disparage the left.

The notion that social scientists might be studying the nature of the human condition without promoting an alternative agenda is rarely accepted, particularly when the topic is politics. The central message of this book is that lurking predispositions are widespread, so we would be the last people to claim social scientists or anyone else can be percent objective and value free.

If you think you are not biased, you are fooling yourself. You get an exception only if you have pointy ears, green blood, and a commission from Star Fleet. While we are just as biased as everyone else, the great thing about the scientific process is that the biases of a single research team eventually get squeezed out. In our bailiwick, data and evidence ultimately rule, or at a minimum have more influence than hidden political agendas.

Our world is the world of empirical social science, a pretty ruthlessly Darwinian piece of real estate. It revolves around an ongoing scientific process that affords skeptics the chance to participate fully. Different researchers weigh in, replication will occur or not , and eventually the truth will emerge — not a definitive or ultimate truth but the best current shot at the relatively unbiased truth. You should be on guard for suspect methods and biased inference but you should not be paralyzed by suspicion.

You should be skeptical of the results of a single study, including anything we have published. Yet if numerous studies conducted by numerous labs with alternative techniques and in diverse settings begin to point in the same direction, you should accept that the burden of proof shifts to those who deny that liberals and conservatives have deep differences. Unfortunately, when it comes to politics, the distinction between systematic, validated description and howling ridicule is all too often ignored, the upshot being that any research showing psychological or biological differences between liberals and conservatives is reflexively treated by one side or the other, and often both, as biased.

When it comes to ideology, difference equals value judgment in the minds of many, when in reality it is possible to be different without being better or worse. That said, we freely recognize that suspicions of political judgments hiding within social science research or even in the headlines are not without foundation.

Were these conclusions unduly biased? We can say that the two studies cited above were quickly and robustly challenged. Like others who deconstructed the empirical and conceptual case behind those statements, we are skeptical of some of the supporting evidence. That is what the scientific process does. Identifying problems makes it possible to correct them subsequently.

The account we present in this book is based not on a single study but on a massive collection of studies conducted by many scholars in many countries. This does not mean the final truth has been discovered; it means that the weight of evidence permits confidence in the claim that liberals and conservatives really are fundamentally different.

We are not trying to demonstrate that conservatives are crypto-Nazis or that liberals are nai'fs who need a good sock in the mouth to jar them into recognizing reality. We just want to know why people are so different politically. So, if only for the time it takes to read this book, we ask readers to suspend any instincts to dismiss as crassly biased any research that does not conclude that their political foes are evil incarnate.

We will note some imperfections of those foes along the way, but keep in mind that nobody is perfect and the imperfections of liberals are very different from the imperfections of conservatives. The task we set ourselves here is not to tally the imperfections of each ideological group in order to declare one group the winner. We just want to know why the groups exist in the first place. Whether the topic is climate change, evolution, genetically modified foods, or the biological basis of political beliefs, people are quick these days to apply the label of junk science to research on controversial matters.

The implication is that some research is driven by special interests and hidden agendas to such an extent that it cannot be considered real science or, more likely, that some topics are simply not suitable for science. Replication should take care of the hidden agenda issue and as far as some topics not being amenable to the scientific process, consider this. Researchers recently presented one group of people with scientific evidence that confirmed their prior beliefs while a second group received the same evidence but it disconfirmed their prior beliefs.

Compared to those receiving belief-confirming evidence, those receiving the belief-disconfirming but very same scientific evidence were much more likely to conclude that the topic could not be studied scientifically. Pm a Libercontrarian What about those who do not feel comfortable being pigeonholed as liberal or conservative? What about all those folks who live in countries where those two words do not hold much meaning, even when translated? What about all the people who could not care less about politics? A common mistake in addressing differences in political orientations is to leave the impression that they begin and end with the distinction between liberals and conservatives or between those on the political leftand those on the right we use these pairs of terms interchangeably.

These labels are short, convenient, and convey an intuitive notion of political differences. We will use them for exacdy that reason throughout this book. Still, it is quite true that they fail to capture the political views of a goodly percentage of people. So before going any further we wish to make it clear that, even though we often use phrases such as liberal and conservative or leftand right for shorthand, this book is about political differences generally and not merely differences between two discrete collections of ideological beliefs. The differences we are talking about reflect variation across a continuum and perhaps many continuums, not traits that lump everyone into two camps.

Some scholars think ideology is such a complicated and nuanced critter that it demands more than one type of measurement — sort of like body mass is measured by height and weight, ideology should be measured by, say, views on economic policies and views on social policies. Even so, the unidimensional concept of making sense of political differences captures a very long tradition of describing political differences. Using these labels, though, could create confusion, and we want to head that off if we can. As a result, in Australia political conservatives belong to the Liberal Party, which may seem a contradiction.

In America the best- known libertarians e. Our claims apply to other countries and other times. If Mill and Emerson are as correct as we believe them to be, a broad left-right dimension anchors politics universally, even if unique issues and varying collections of positions provide plenty of variation. In sum, our results and interpretations apply to those in the United States who are not comfortable categorizing themselves as either liberals or conservatives and also to those living in countries in which the liberal-conservative distinction is not used.

People who are moderates and there are a good many moderates , libertarians, or Social Democrats are likely to have their own politically relevant predispositions. The social world is messy and full of idiosyncrasies, and making sense of what explains variation in political oudook is going to be a hunt for hints in the gray, not the black and white. We spend most of our time hunting for modest patterns buried amid remarkable complexity. That is the world we are inviting you into. Many are skeptical of this world, and not without reason. Whenever a study claims to find something that systematically varies with political orientations, lots of people start thinking of exceptions.

For example, at least in the United States, more education is generally associated with more liberal-leaning political preferences. Yet it is easy to cite examples of highly educated conservatives William Buckley was a Yale alum and conservative columnist George Will has degrees from Oxford and Princeton. Higher levels of religiosity are generally associated with being conservative. Yet there are plenty of pious liberals wandering about Reinhold Niebuhr — one of the best known twentieth-century theologians — was a committed Christian and also an influential left- winger.

These contrary cases, though, should be kept in perspective. The occasional exception does not negate a pattern. If it is cold today, that does not mean the global climate is cooling. Knowing a lifelong smoker who still runs marathons does not alter the fact that smoking is a serious health risk. Thinking probabilistically rather than deterministically is absolutely key to understanding the message of this book. All the relationships we describe are only tendencies, not hard and fast rules. Predispositions are not destiny, but defaults — defaults that can be and frequentiy are overridden.

But the fact that there is any predisposition at all is important as it tilts subsequent attitudes and behavior in one direction or the other. A person with a particular set of physiological and cognitive traits will not automatically be a liberal or a conservative, but is more likely to be one or the other.

We have a pair of nines. A reasonable hand for five-card stud but not a sure-fire winner. We may not be doing ourselves any favors by confessing that we cannot claim to have discovered the definitive basis of political differences. Nobody likes caveats hanging from their bumper sticker certainties. But we think that much of the skepticism surrounding this line of research stems from people perceiving that the results and claims are stronger than they are. This is important because, particularly when biological variables are involved, some people tend to think one exception to the claimed pattern negates the entire enterprise.

This simply is not the case; biology and certainly psychology largely works probabilistically rather than deterministically so exceptions are always to be expected. Eating lots of junk food, for example, increases your chances of suffering from a whole range of health problems. It does not guarantee those problems will actually appear — some candy-snacking fast food devotees stay in good health, the lucky so-and-sos — but it does make it a lot more likely.

To get accustomed to thinking probabilistically, we need a good, simple example. Consider the relationship between a personality trait — for example, conscientiousness — and ideology. Higher levels of conscientiousness correlate with being more conservative, a relationship replicated in a number of independent studies. To begin, we need reliable measures of both conservatism and conscientiousness. Though we can observe indicators of conservatism say, who you vote for or conscientiousness say, whether or not you jaywalk , these are mostly psychological concepts.

How conservative or conscientious we are is something that exists mostly in our heads, making measurement challenging. We lack a skull-penetrating measurement machine that tells us how long your conservatism is in millicons or what your conscientiousness weighs in consc-o-grams. Social scientists overcome this problem mosdy by asking people how conservative and how conscientious they are. If we divide our sample into conservatives and liberals and those who are and are not conscientious, we get the distribution displayed in the table in the top panel of Figure 1.

This shows that 52 percent of conservatives are conscientious compared to 40 percent of liberals. If we reach into this distribution and randomly collar one of our conservative research subjects, our best bet is that he or she will be conscientious. Randomly selecting a liberal, on the other hand, would yield someone conscientious only an estimated 40 percent of the time. There is no certainty to this outcome — only a set of odds that make the conservative research subject marginally more likely to be conscientious and the liberal research subject marginally less likely to be conscientious.

In casino terms, a conscientious conservative is the safe bet — and while it will not always pay off, over the long run it will. This general description applies to most all relationships in the social and biological sciences. Certainty is rarely apparent; get used to exceptions. Though getting across the basic notion of probabilistic relationships, frequency comparisons are pretty crude and uninformative.

It is the same deal with conscientiousness — differences with regard to this trait are generally of degree rather than kind. A more accurate approach to assessing these sorts of relationships is through the statistical concept of correlation, which makes it possible to look at measures that have many increments, not just two.

Take a look at the graph in the second panel of Figure 1. This contains the same information as the table in the top panel. Our measure of conservatism was not a simple are-you-or-arenT-you question. We asked people their opinions — whether they strongly agreed, agreed, disagreed, or strongly disagreed — with 20 issue positions on everything from defense spending to gay marriage.

We converted conservative positions e. This gives us a potential range of 20 very liberal on all issues to very conservative on all issues with a full range of intermediate positions in between. Responses to the first question ranged from strongly agree 1 to strongly disagree 7 ; responses to the second ranged from very accurate 1 to very inaccurate 5.

Adding these together gives an index with a theoretical range of 2 to 12, with those scoring higher being presumably more orderly, careful, and committed to finishing their to do list every day. In other words, people who are more conscientious. We computed two measures, plotted them on a standard X-Y axis graph and ended up with something that looks like an aerial shot of Trafalgar Square after a particularly nasty outbreak of pigeon diarrhea.

What good does that do us? The answer might be made a little clearer by looking at the scatter-plots in Figure 1. These plot body weight first with high jump performance top panel , then shot put performance middle panel , and then number of nephews and nieces bottom panel , for 20 hypothetical male athletes. A negative relationship indicates that as one variable goes up, the other goes down. The correlation for the two variables in the top panel is The correlation for the two variables in the middle panel is 0.

These are really high correlations and they also make sense. It is difficult to imagine sumo wrestlers Fosbury Flopping over six feet, just as it is difficult to imagine top-flight marathon runners heaving pound lead balls 60 feet. The correlation in the bottom panel is near zero — 0. That, too, makes sense.

As far we are aware, your heft has little to do with the reproductive capacities of your siblings. So we have a handy number that can summarize some obvious relationships between body weight and just about any other variable you care to imagine. What exactly does this have to do with politics? Look back at that bottom panel of Figure 1. While it is hard to discern a clear relationship, one does exist.


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What this means is that the higher your score on conservative issue positions, the higher your score on the conscientiousness index. This, though, is a pretty small correlation. A correlation of 0. On the basis of the evidence, we cannot say that all conservatives are conscientious — we would need a correlation of 1. Technically, we cannot even say that conscientiousness causes conservatism or vice versa — conservatism and conscientiousness might both be caused by something else.

What we can say is that there is a modest but systematic tendency for conscientious people to be conservative. That might not be completely obvious from the scatterplot in Figure 1. You might notice that underneath each figure reference is not just an r but also a p value. P here stands for probability and should be interpreted as the likelihood of a relationship occurring by chance. Alow p increases confidence in a relationship.

Scholarly norms hold that the p should be less than 0. A correlation coefficient of 0. For example, traits or behaviors that demonstrate statistically significant correlations with a serious health issue, say breast cancer, of even. Ultimately, this is the reason we have taken a statistical digression in the first chapter of the book and run the risk of sending you fleeing back into the comforting polemics of Kenny Conservative or Linda Liberal. The vast majority of the relationships we are going to describe in this book can be summarized by similarly modest correlations.

If you think you are an exception to one of the correlations reported in these pages, you are probably right and undoubtedly have a good deal of company. This does not mean those relationships are any less real, though, as long as you remember to think probabilistically. Just as one cold day does not falsify global warming, one conscientious liberal does not alter the fact that there is a systematic relationship between conservatism and conscientiousness. What Is a Predisposition? Looking at a pencil is not exactly a thrill-a-minute proposition, but what happens inside your body during this mundane event is a slick piece of biochemical engineering.

The eye treats the shape and color of the object as input that is transmitted via the optic nerve to the occipital lobe at the back of the brain where it is then relayed to other parts of the brain and identified as a pencil. Though your neurobiology is involved, viewing the pencil likely does not stir up much activity in the limbic or emotional parts of your brain. Looking at pencils, in other words, does not typically give people joy, melancholy, or a case of the hots.

Loved ones, dangerous animals, beautiful landscapes, disgusting objects, cute babies, and threatening situations all tend to spur activity in neural channels not activated by viewing a pencil. In response to such stimuli, people report intense reactions and exhibit physiological changes. Brain imaging will show heightened activity in emotionally relevant parts of the brain, including the amygdala, insular cortex, hypothalamus, hippocampus, and anterior cingulate cortex; an endocrinological assay will show alterations in hormonal levels; heart rate and respiration will accelerate, pupils will dilate, and palms will get sweaty.

To put it more simply, the body changes in measurable ways. These physiological changes affect how an object is perceived, processed, and responded to — and the variation from person to person in the nature of these responses is substantial. Each of us is primed to respond physiologically and psychologically to certain categories of stimuli — just not to the same stimuli and not to the same degree.

Show a group of people the same stimulus and some will flatline while others will get a case of the vapors. People are not fully conscious of their predispositions. Even then, they were not taken seriously for a long time. Job applicant resumes reviewed on heavy clipboards are judged more worthy than identical resumes on lighter clipboards; holding a warm or hot drink can influence whether opinions of other people are positive or negative; when people reach out to pick up an orange while smelling strawberries they unwittingly spread their fingers less widely — as if they were picking up a strawberry rather than an orange.

People actively deny that a chunky clipboard has anything to do with their assessment of job applicants or that a funky odor has anything to do with their moral judgments. Judges certainly refuse to believe that the length of time since their last break has anything to do with their sentencing decisions; after all, they are meting out objective justice. Leibniz was right, though, and the baloney generator is full of it.

The way we respond — biologically, physiologically, and in many cases unwittingly — to our environments influences attitudes and behavior. People much prefer to believe, however, that their decisions and opinions are rational rather than rationalized. This desire to believe we are rational is certainly in effect when it comes to politics, where an unwillingness to acknowledge the role of extraneous forces of which we may not even be aware is especially strong.

Many pretend that politics is a product of citizens taking their civic obligations seriously, sifting through political messages and information, and then carefully and deliberately considering the candidates and issue positions before making a consciously informed decision. Compared to people not just judges with full stomachs, those who have not eaten for several hours are more sympathetic to the plight of welfare recipients- Americans whose polling place happens to be a church are more likely to vote for right-of-center candidates and ideas than those whose polling place is a public school.

People think they know the reasons they vote for the candidates they do or espouse particular political positions or beliefs, but there is at least a slice of baloney in that thinking. Responses to political stimuli are animated by emotional and not always conscious bodily processes. The fact that extraneous forces that may not have crossed the threshold of awareness sometimes called sub-threshold shape political orientations and actions makes it possible for individual variation in nonpolitical variables to affect politics.

If hotter ambient temperatures in a room increase acceptance of global warming, maybe people whose internal thermostats incline them to feeling hot are also more likely to be accepting of global warming. Likewise, sensitivity to clutter and disorder, to smell, to disgust, and to threats becomes potentially relevant to political views. Since elements of these sensitivities often are outside of conscious awareness, it becomes possible that political views are shaped by psychological and physiological patterns.

It is important to recognize that predispositions are not fixed at birth. We cannot emphasize enough that we are not making a nature versus nurture argument. Innate forces combine with early development and later powerful environmental events to create attitudinal and behavioral tendencies. These predispositions are physically grounded in the circuitry of the nervous system, so once instantiated they can be very difficult, but far from impossible, to change. Altering a predisposition is like turning a supertanker; it usually takes concerted force for an extended period of time, but it can be done.

Just like those heavy clipboards, a variety of predispositions nudge us in one direction or another, often without our knowledge, increasing the odds that we will behave in a certain way but leaving plenty of room for predispositions to be contravened and also for the predispositions themselves to be modified. Still, while it is possible for situations and events to alter predispositions, attitudes are notoriously resistant to change. This is true outside the realm of politics and definitely true within it.

Several months after experiencing even major life events such as an amputation or winning the lottery it appears that most people have returned to a degree of happiness with their lives surprisingly similar to that present before the major event. We believe the reason for this relative stability is the existence of an ingrained emotional and therefore physiological response to stimuli that ends up being relevant to politics.

It takes quite a bit for such habituated emotional responses to be eliminated, let alone reversed. Once they are there, they tend to be there for the long haul. For example, people may have a predisposed response to Barack Obama that would be evoked by a garden-variety image of him.

Subsequent events and information, perhaps about his role in killing Osama Bin Laden, or a picture of him losing his composure, could alter that default response. A final critical and often misunderstood element of predispositions is that they are not equally present in all people. Just as the content of the predisposition varies from person to person, so too does the degree to which a predisposition is present at all.

Being politically predisposed is not a requirement for membership in the human race. Like most everything else, the presence of predispositions should be thought of as operating along a continuum. Certain people are in possession of powerful political predispositions and politically relevant stimuli set off easily measurable psychological, cognitive, and physiological responses. Perhaps the nature of the political predisposition points in a liberal direction, perhaps in a conservative direction, or perhaps in different directions depending upon the particular issue.

Other people have much weaker political predispositions. For them, politics is mosdy irrelevant and they do not have much in the way of a preexisting, physiocognitive basis for their political behavior and attitudes. These individuals are often puzzled by all the fuss about politics. The central thesis of this book is that many people have broad predispositions relevant to their behaviors and inclinations in the realm of politics.

These predispositions can be measured with psychologically oriented survey items, with cognitive tests that do not rely on self-reports, with brain imaging, or with traditional physiological and endocrinological indicators. Due to perceptual, psychological, processing, and physiological differences, liberals and conservatives, for all intents and purposes, perceive and thus experience different worlds. Given this, it is not surprising to find they approach politics as though they were somewhat distinct species. Folk wisdom has long put down political differences to something deep, perhaps even biological.

There have been numerous efforts to study whether political beliefs reflect deeper psychological tendencies such as personality traits we address this possibility in Chapter 4. These attempts have frequently been met with scorched earth criticism. This situation may finally be changing. After a lull, the last 10 years have seen a flowering of research on the broader forces intertwined with politics. This more recent research can be placed in one of two overarching categories. In the first, politics is measured using survey questionnaires that probe characteristics like personal values, moral foundations, personality traits, psychological tendencies, and sensitivity to disgust.

The predispositions people bring with them into political situations can be referred to as motivated social reasoning, hot cognition, habits, longstanding predispositions, or antecedent conditions. Even readers primed to accept that the differences between liberals and conservatives extend well beyond the realm of politics may not appreciate the biological and cognitive depth of these differences.

In short, for the first time real progress is being made in connecting political variations with biological and cognitive variations. This newer, biologically informed research is cumulating in a fashion that the more psychologically based efforts of the s, s, and s did not, but the critics of placing politics in broader context have not gone away. In fact, for several reasons, they appear more tenacious. The incorporation of biology is particularly troubling to people who fail to realize that biology is not tantamount to determinism. Moreover, the popular press monitors academic findings in this area closely, opening channels to a broader array of critics.


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    • Online outlets and networks further widen opportunities to offer commentary, particularly on an incendiary topic such as the deeper differences between liberals and conservatives. Whereas critics of the earlier iterations often were restricted to academic circles, that is hardly an apt description of the current situation. George Will assailed psychologist John Jost for his assertion that political orientations are undergirded by motivated social cognition.

    Though critics of the movement to place politics in biological and psychological context hail from academia, journalism, and the public at large, political scientists are especially dubious. A longstanding assumption in political science, best exemplified in the influential work of Philip Converse, is that political beliefs and ideologies are narrow and apply only to politics. The fundamental idea is that to be in possession of a political ideology it is necessary to know the meaning of labels such as liberal and conservative and also to be in possession of a consistent set of political preferences that add up to a coherent match with those labels.

    As a result of this formulation, many scholars have convinced themselves that ideology is rare and getting rarer now that the big isms, such as Communism and Fascism, are history. In sum, Groucho Marx, Gilbert and Sullivan, and folk wisdom notwithstanding, plenty of people find the possibility of deeper, biological bases of politics both unbelievable and off-putting. Our goal in this book is to show readers that deep, biological, politically relevant predispositions are quite real and anything but preposterous.

    Even if such a group-sing came to pass, liberals probably would be holding their lighters aloft, swaying as they sang with undisciplined abandon, while conservatives would be sitting in orderly rows, perhaps pews, performing a clipped, somewhat cold, but extremely well-rehearsed rendition. The forced agreement on lyrics and melody would be superficial and misleading.

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    Vidal would be in the back making up dirty lyrics and Buckley would be down front trying to maintain order and threatening to punch Vidal in the kisser. The way to live with political differences is not to perpetuate the myth that they are a passing and remediable inconvenience but to recognize their depth and work effectively within the constraints they inevitably create.

    Rather than fanning the flames of ideological disagreement, the goal should be to ameliorate the problems disagreement creates. Understanding the reasons for gridlock and polarization will not cause these problems to disappear magically but will suggest realistic approaches to softening their edges and improving governance.

    Such an acknowledgment would not entail giving up on efforts at political persuasion. Remember that the relationships we are about to describe are modest and probabilistic. Approval of the other side is not what we advocate but the political system will be a happier and more productive place if political adversaries are viewed not with scorn but with a perhaps grudging recognition that they experience a different world. This means accepting that political orientations are connected to deep physio cognitive predispositions in a broadly predictable fashion. Acceptance of this belief requires rejecting two widely accepted assertions.

    The first is that all politics is culturally and historically idiosyncratic since one society might be concerned with famines and droughts, another with the super-power across the river, and yet another with protecting mineral riches. If this assertion is true, it becomes pointless to try to generalize about political divisions, patterns, and viewpoints. If, from a behavioral point of view, human architecture is all the same, it follows that differences in political orientations cannot be more than skin deep and physio cognitive predispositions are irrelevant.

    Both assertions — one about the nature of politics and one about the nature of humans — are incorrect. In fact, they have it exacdy backwards: Though traditional wisdom asserts that politics varies and human nature is universal, in truth politics is universal and human nature varies. Failing to appreciate these two points renders it impossible to grasp the true source of political conflict.

    Accordingly, before we present empirical evidence documenting the deep-seated psychological, cognitive, physiological, and genetic correlates of political variation Chapters 4 -7T we first need to make the case that politics is universal and human nature is variable Chapters 2 and 3, respectively. Notes 1 You can find a complete audio of the minute debate at http: Clips of the juiciest exchanges can be found on Youtube.

    Still, asking carefully vetted questions and adding them up is the basic gist of it. The Secret Lives of the Brain, The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Free Will and the Science of the Brain. Evaluating the U. Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment. The Myth of a Polarized America. Chapter 2 Getting Into Bedrock with Politics If the Left-Right distinction did not exist, scholars of ideology would need to invent its equivalent. John Jost Politics is for the present Albert Einstein Former U.

    As long-time college professors, we are dubious. Still, this does not mean that conservative suspicions about faculty politics are without merit most academics are left-leaning or that there are no historical examples of campus ideological indoctrination. The City College of New York in the mid-twentieth century, for instance, came about as close as any institution of higher education will ever come to fulfilling right-wing nightmares of academia.

    The faculty, already tainted with a hint of radical leftism, caused a scandal by trying to hire British polymath Bertrand Russell — who apart from being a genius was a well-known Socialist, pacifist, and general promoter of avant-garde social ideas he thought religion outdated and saw nothing morally objectionable about premarital sex.

    Astonishingly, the legal system obliged. State Supreme Court Justice John McGeehan ruled Russell morally unfit to teach, the upshot being that City College students dodged the bullet of taking instruction from a future Nobel laureate. This was unfortunate for champions of conservative rectitude in higher education; the students, if anything, were more radical than the faculty. Communists controlled the school newspaper; Socialists sought the ouster of the Reserve Officer Training Corps; and campus left-wingers of various denominations issued manifestoes denouncing capitalism, cuts in education, oppression of the working class, imperialist wars and nonimperialist wars, imperialists in general and Franklin Delano Roosevelt in particular, who apparently was considered by a surprising fraction of the student body to be an imperialist, right-wing, war-mongering oppressor of the working classes who was not doing nearly enough for education.

    At the time, anti-Semitism led to Jewish quotas at many American universities but not at liberal-minded City. As a result of the prejudices elsewhere in higher education, City College ended up with an astonishing concentration of intellectual talent, including nine Nobel Prize winners who graduated between and At the periphery of the lunchroom were alcoves consisting of benches facing low refectory tables in rectangular or semicircular spaces.

    There were a dozen or so of these alcoves and each was the turf of a particular political, ethnic, or religious group; for example, there was a Zionist alcove, a Catholic alcove, and an alcove for the smattering of African American students. These were mosdy hardcore supporters of the type of Communism practiced by the Soviet Union.

    These leftists, though, did not impose the same sort of ideological purity test required for admission into Alcove No. They included a group of a dozen Trotskyists, a roughly equal number of Socialists, a few followers of other miscellaneous isms, and a handful of right-wingers, which in this group meant they voted for Roosevelt and called themselves Social Democrats. Radical left-wing politics and ideology was constantly discussed and debated in Alcoves No. Julius Rosenberg, Communist boogeyman number one of the McCarthy era, was executed in for passing on atomic secrets to the Soviet Union.

    Before trying to advance the vanguard of the proletariat by giving Commies the bomb, Rosenberg had graduated from City College with a degree in electrical engineering. More principled and moderate leftists who were City College alums included people like Irving Howe, who went on to help found the quarterly magazine Dissent as well as the Democratic Socialists of America.

    That is not to say a movement failed to materialize from the radicalized, left-wing atmosphere of City College. The son of Fletcher Christian , leader of the mutiny on the Bounty. Despite not being Japanese or a sperm whale , he has control over the global diamond industry. Hubert Blaine Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff, Sr.

    Can ancient pottery be used to play back recorded voices from the distant past? Russian girl who claims to have X-ray vision. Drake's Plate of Brass. A forgery -related practical joke that went horribly awry. A taxon species, genus, family, etc. Further research is needed. Some researchers are researching its effects, but FRIN Somewhat like Monty Python 's Dead Parrot , it's not really dead, it's just resting. List of Ig Nobel Prize winners. Nobel Prize meets Weird Science. A parody of science that purports to study what lies beyond the realm of metaphysics.

    A pejorative term for scientific ideas that will simply not "go away", long after they are given up on as wrong by the majority of scientists in the field. Physicist Alan Sokal demonstrates that at least some postmodernists can't see an emperor with no clothes. A phenomenon found in psychological and sociological research which suggests that people associate more positive attributes with the general social category of women compared to men. Including white , pink , purple, blue A year-old, known as the Radioactive Boy Scout , who irradiated his back yard attempting to build a nuclear breeder reactor from spare parts.

    A two-time radioactive killer.

    Wikipedia:Unusual articles

    Fictional elements, isotopes and atomic particles. A phenomenon involving a persistent and invasive low-frequency noise of a humming character and unknown origin, not audible to all people, reported in various geographical locations. A serious piece of scientific apparatus whose name has induced sniggering among English-speaking schoolchildren for over years.

    List of unusual units of measurement. An alternative theory of integrated circuits: Something in the lab not working? Quantum suicide and immortality. What happens when you blow in a hole in a tube? Hot air comes out one end and cold air comes out the other. No consensus reached on why it happens yet. A strange unit of distance used to measure the Harvard Bridge. Sound of fingernails scraping chalkboard.

    Does a mystery sound from the bottom of the sea indicate that Cthulhu may awake? List of unexplained sounds. Mumbai "sweet" seawater incident. Red rain in Kerala. The crew of Apollo 17 snapped Earth with Antarctica on top. NASA followed Ptolemy and rotated it "back". An unlucky park ranger who was hit by lightning on seven separate occasions. He survived them all, but came to his own tragic end. A recently discovered mineral that forms from bird feces.

    A commonly used chemical that can be deadly to all forms of plant and animal life, contributing to global warming , erosion , acid rain , torture and countless other maladies. List of chemical compounds with unusual names. Some a consequence of their constituents or origins, others simply the work of whimsical chemists. A day in celebration of Avogadro's number , 6. A term used to describe any material with properties that are unlikely or impossible for any real material to possess.

    Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster. A small statuette which is the only sculpture on the moon. List of hypothetical Solar System objects. The planets that could have been. You think Pluto had it rough? At least it got its fifteen minutes of astronomical fame. The Moon is made of green cheese. Moon landing conspiracy theories. Fake photos, slow-motion cameras and secret studios.

    All directed by Stanley Kubrick. Did the Luftwaffe, in fact, explore the final frontier and make contact with alien races? Whether the secret Nazi base is on the Moon or in Antarctica, the truth is apparently out there. And when you've exhausted the list , here's something new to try! The first fallen meteorite in recorded history to have verifiably injured a human. An unusual neurological disorder, also known as " Dr. Strangelove syndrome", whereby one of the sufferer's hands seems to take on a life of its own. Taking a close look at a toilet bowl for the sake of science.

    The scale was inspired by eye charts. Young's Ideal Rectal Dilators. The notion that food dropped on the floor is safe to eat only as long as it's picked up within five seconds. Also known as "Human Werewolf Syndrome ". Hypoalgesic effect of swearing. As Redd Foxx once observed, "if you've never said 'shit', come back with me after the show and I'll slam my car door on your hand'". And you will feel better. Maple syrup urine disease. A condition frequently reported in medical students who perceive themselves to be experiencing the symptoms of the diseases they are studying.

    A disease, most envied by poker players, that makes facial expressions impossible. Schmidt sting pain index. An entomologist is stung by just about everything known to sting and, en route, describes the pain involved in terms of a four-point comparative scale. A form of surgery where a hole is drilled or scraped into the skull. It was thought that such a procedure could cure problems like epilepsy or allow a person to enter into a higher state of consciousness.

    Allegedly a sex move involving punching one's partner in the back of the head during intercourse. Hamster zona-free ovum test. There is a day dedicated to protect the right to masturbate! A medical condition where one of two conjoined twins lacks essential organs and must rely on the other for survival, often leeching its blood. An especially rare variant of this, fetus in fetu , involves one partially formed fetus developing within the body of the other. A colloquial term referring to a type of mass hysteria or panic where males grow fearful of removal or shrinking of the penis.

    Persistent genital arousal disorder. A condition found in remote regions of India in which people believe they have conceived a puppy shortly after being bitten by a dog. A form of parasomnia similar to sleepwalking that causes people to engage in sexual acts while they are asleep. A Frenchwoman with the longest verified human lifespan in recorded history. She was at the time of her death. Abigail and Brittany Hensel. Conjoined twins with separate heads but joined bodies.

    An American trainee doctor who went to unusual lengths in his quest to prove that yellow fever is not contagious. A 19th-century construction worker who survived a three-foot-long 0. His resultant behavioral changes have made him an important figure in the development of neuroscience. A 19th-century Scottish surgeon who, among other things, performed what has been described as "The only operation in history with a percent mortality".

    A Peruvian girl who gave birth to a son when she was five years old, becoming the youngest human mother on record. Unknown forces cause large groups of people to dance hysterically until dropping from exhaustion in multiple incidents in Europe from the 13th to 17th centuries. A real parasomnia that has been successfully used as a defence in court. Jumping Frenchmen of Maine. A behavioral disorder with some very odd symptoms, including "hypersexuality" and a desire to examine objects with the mouth. Named after two doctors who gave psychotropic drugs to lobotomized monkeys.

    A Japanese expression referring to an urge to defecate that is suddenly felt after entering bookstores. When a late-night radio host claims to have been brainwashed by the CIA, you may want to think twice. Particularly common among Japanese tourists. Not to be confused with Jerusalem Syndrome or Stockholm Syndrome. A psychosomatic illness that causes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, fainting, confusion and even hallucinations when an individual is exposed to art or natural beauty.

    The Truman Show delusion. Those afflicted feel they are being watched all the time by a television audience, like Jim Carrey in the movie The Truman Show. Depopulation of cockroaches in the ex-USSR countries. A deceptive beetle larva that entices its own predators by feigning prey-like movements in order to eat its predator. An as-yet unexplained phenomenon observed in April in Germany and Denmark. Suggested as a possible weapons delivery system. No, the fish are not trippin'; they will cause hallucinations if ingested.

    It is not known if hallucinations will occur if one fish consumes another. List of animals displaying homosexual behavior. List of animals with fraudulent diplomas. A species of mosquito that lives in underground railways. Droppings of a nightingale variety used in facials. Some claim that it helps with acne.

    A species of isopod that has some males that mimic females and others that mimic juveniles, allowing them to mate without the alpha males realising what is going on behind their backs. Telepathic communication is not possible in snails no matter how far apart they may be.

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    Nothing else has been ruled out. A literal figurative variety of cockfighting between some species of flatworm. And the partridges better hide because the dogs think they are yummy. Did you know that prostitution exists among animals? Stray animals at Indian airports. Having an extra body part, be it as simple as an eleventh finger or as extreme as a second head! A feature of Stegosaurus anatomy named after a Far Side comic strip. A parasitic crustacean that, when female they are hermaphroditic , attaches to and then destroys a fish's tongue, hooks itself to the remaining stub and becomes the fish's new tongue.

    A form of mating in invertebrates in which the male stabs the female in the abdomen with his penis, and injects his sperm through the wound. The practice of growing small jar-shaped kittens caused controversy years after it was revealed to be a hoax. A cat famed for traveling on a bus around Plymouth , England. Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office. Dusty the Klepto Kitty. One of the national treasures of Turkey. He eventually returned to the UK and spent the rest of his life at the 'Home for Sailors'.

    A hospice cat who was featured in the New England Journal of Medicine for his purported ability to predict the impending death of terminally ill patients. A cat that was appointed Mayor of Talkeetna , Alaska. The official station master of Kishi railway station in Japan. A plastic-coated magnet fed to cows to prevent gut damage by ingested bits of metal, aka hardware disease. Chicken and duck blood soup.

    Chicken Dance , Chicken dance. Valuable for the mitigation of damage from bird strikes. The chicken carcass must be thawed first, though. A colony of feral chickens that have been living underneath a highway off-ramp since Mike the Headless Chicken. Squirrel induced power outages in Pennsylvania. Did you know that insurance companies have a medical code for this? Co-pays vary by insurance plan. Queen Victoria 's officially appointed rat-catcher and mole destroyer. A pig bred to look like the flag of Denmark , to circumvent prohibition of the flag.

    It is said to enhance sexual potency in men and was banned by the Chinese government from the Olympics. The next time a whale washes on shore in one Oregon county, the authorities will leave the dynamite at home. Blobs of organic matter found washed up on beaches, which are frequently as mysterious as they are disgusting.

    Implanted electrodes let researchers "steer the animal over an obstacle course, making it twist, turn and even jump on demand". Monkey selfie copyright dispute. Is a selfie taken by the critically-endangered Celebes crested macaque eligible for copyright? The Wikipedia article in question focuses on the copyright claim and is the subject of a lawsuit by the owner of the camera on which the images were taken.

    Full text of "Predisposed Liberals, Conservatives, And The Biology Of Political Differences"

    Pornographic movies created to achieve sexual arousal for Giant pandas , which have been proven to be unaffected by the popular drug Viagra. Street dogs in Moscow. The dog ate my homework. Dubbed the "world's loneliest whale", it vocalizes at a frequency used by no known whale species. Possibly the oldest creature of modern times, this year-old tortoise was the former pet of Robert Clive of the British East India Company.

    A chimpanzee who used human toilet facilities, moonwalked , and allegedly attempted suicide. Two stray dogs that roamed the streets of San Francisco, California in the early s and were exempted from local ordinances. Domino Day sparrow. Enumclaw horse sex case. A Humboldt penguin who gained worldwide fame after apparently falling in love with a cutout of an anime character.

    The various incarnations of Yale University 's athletic mascot. Hoover the talking seal. A Baboon who took over for his paraplegic owner as an employee of the Cape government railway. A grotesque-looking sea monster made from the corpse of a ray. A left-coiled snail who became famous after a campaign to find another left-coiled snail so he could mate.

    He made the reverse of the 5p of Saint Helena. What have you done? A black dog whose portrayal in The Dam Busters somehow had to be edited out, overdubbed, or renamed. Nigger's grave remains unredacted , though. A chimpanzee , subject of long-running studies into animal language acquisition , named punningly for linguist Noam Chomsky.

    Osama bin Laden elephant. An elusive elephant who terrorized the jungle of Assam. He was eventually shot, but there are those who question the official story of his death. Much like his famous namesake. Hippo and tortoise that befriended each other after the Indian Ocean Tsunami. A now-deceased psychic octopus who could predict the winner of football games, notably during the FIFA World Cup. Ravens of the Tower of London. Ravens used as soldiers in the Tower of London. In , a Northern Bottlenose swam into London and on to the front pages of the British newspapers.

    A 13th-century French dog unofficially venerated as a saint until the s. In , two pigs escaped from an abattoir in Wiltshire and made news, both in the United Kingdom and worldwide. Their story was turned into a TV movie in A tortoise that was present during the bombardment of Sevastopol during the Crimean War in and survived until A pig who survived the sinking of one warship, to become the mascot on one of the ships that had sunk his first home. Tragically he was then auctioned off and eaten.

    An elephant that was electrocuted, as the event was filmed by the Edison Manufacturing Company. He enjoyed beer and cigarettes. Rare blind beetle named after Adolf Hitler , poached by collectors of Hitler memorabilia. A trapdoor spider named after Stephen Colbert. Naturally, because he asked for it. Bill Gates' flower fly. A flower fly , Eristalis gatesi , named after Bill Gates. A new species of monkey that was officially named after the GoldenPalace.

    A genus of crab named in part after the titular character of the Harry Potter franchise. The sole species of this genus is named after the coldly hostile, yet emotion-concealing character from the same franchise. An extracellular matrix -like retinal protein named after Pikachu. A European moth with wing markings bearing a chance resemblance to a letter in the Hebrew alphabet. A protein in the vertebrate hedgehog family that was officially named after Sega 's video game character Sonic the Hedgehog. A type of mushroom named after SpongeBob SquarePants.

    A biting louse named for cartoonist Gary Larson of Far Side fame. A species of snapping shrimp named after the famous English rock band. Zyzyxia lundellii and Zyzzyzus warreni. A solitary acacia that was once the most isolated tree on Earth before being run over by a drunken Libyan truck driver.

    Trees planted from seeds that were taken into space by Apollo An 80, year old quaking aspen colony that is believed to be one of the oldest and heaviest organisms on the planet. A tulip tree located in northeastern Queens , New York City , that is confirmed to be the oldest living thing in the New York metropolitan area, as well as the tallest tree in the NY metro area. It was alive before the birth of Shakespeare.

    Tree of Knowledge Australia. Tree That Owns Itself. An oak tree in Athens, Georgia which is popularly regarded as owning itself. An analog computer built in Ancient Greece. What do you get if your cross an F1 car and a vacuum cleaner? Or "Digesting Duck", an automaton built to simulate a duck eating, digesting, and excreting. A hundred-year-old light bulb that has been burning nonstop for 41 years. Unlike an analog sundial , a clock that indicates the current time with numerals formed by the sunlight striking it. A device made with a light bulb and a record turntable that reportedly induces lucid dreaming.

    And you thought the makers of Die Another Day made it up. There's still no news about invisible Aston Martin V12 Vanquishes. Alleged spiritual voices heard in white noise and radio interference. Film actress co-invents communication system later used in cell phones , Wi-Fi and other forms of wireless technologies. History of perpetual motion machines.

    Spheres with three parallel grooves dated to be three billion years old Evidence of ancient intelligent life? An unusual natural phenomenon? List of inventors killed by their own inventions. Why it's always a bad idea to put the guy next door out of business if he has a ten-ton armor-plated bulldozer in his garage. Not to forget the CIA's own pigeon camera. Chilean robo-socialism control chamber invented by a Brit with a gigantic beard. Royal Mail rubber band.

    Russian floating nuclear power station. A cross between a spoon and a fork. Not to be confused with a knork. Meteorology by frightened annelid. How to measure your emotional response to androids. A Chinese robot, according to the Japanese, that will save its country from corporate capitalism with its crotch cannon.

    A congealed lump of fat and non-biodegradable buildup in sewer systems. A metre-long, tonne specimen was discovered under London in September Microsoft's attempt to bring you the interwebzzz inside the portable public loo. Committee to End Pay Toilets in America. A s organization whose campaign was to end pay toilets in the United States of America. List of people who died on the toilet. Possibly the largest example of fossilised human feces ever found, discovered under the future site of a Lloyds Bank in England.

    Not all injuries and deaths linked to toilets are urban legends. A fake penis used to beat drug tests complete with dried urine, heater, syringe. Comes in white, tan, Latino, brown, and black. International holiday declared by the United Nations. An unusual traditional garment of western New Guinea , also known as the "penis gourd". Meat dress of Lady Gaga. A marketing mishap, many well-meaning young women, and vanity came together to form this demographic.

    A T-shirt with wolves howling at the moon that gained popularity after one person wrote a parodic review for it on Amazon. Two Japan Airlines aircraft were roughly meters away from causing the deadliest aviation accident in history. British Rail flying saucer. China National Highway traffic jam. The world's longest-lasting traffic jam, in which some drivers were stuck for up to 5 days, moving only 1km 0. The day that Sweden changed its traffic directionality. A concept car with 3 wheels. It was 20 feet 6. Get Out and Push Railroad.

    A confusion over units leads to a Boeing plane running out of fuel mid-flight and becoming a glider. Not your local Bible-thumping preacher but the bolt on the top of a helicopter that connects it to the rotor blades. Loose wheel nut indicator. An Iranian refugee who lived in Charles de Gaulle Airport from until A car buried in a time capsule in and unearthed in , only to discover that it had suffered 50 years of water damage underground and wouldn't start.

    Why passengers must be discouraged from flushing or using toilets while the train is at a station. A Soviet attempt at a turbofan -powered crop duster. It is the slowest jet aircraft to enter production as well as the only jet biplane or jet crop duster to exist. A three-wheeled car formerly manufactured in England that could be driven with a motorcycle license. The delivery of mail by rocket or missile, attempted by various organisations in many different countries, with varying levels of success. A color especially formulated for use on school buses in the United States.

    The concept and art of using intermodal containers to build stuff. An association formed to oppose the custom of addressing railway sleeping car porters as "George" regardless of their actual name. All railroads lead to Rome. With "no smoking" signs, although tobacco was unknown to ancient Romans Westray to Papa Westray flight. The world's shortest passenger flight, lasting as little as 53 seconds. Just don't expect an in-flight meal. Niue's top-level domain, which is regulated by Sweden and almost exclusively used by European countries.

    A well-known computer Easter egg found in the Netscape and Mozilla series of browsers. He's so smart, he has his own cellular automaton. A pair of mathematicians who built a supercomputer out of spare parts. Refers to programming languages designed as a test of the boundaries of computer programming language design, as a proof of concept, or as jokes, and not with the intention of being adopted for real-world programming.

    If you thought the blue screen of death was bad, this computer error would hamper your quest to reach Nirvana. Protocol for controlling and monitoring coffee pots. Attempting to use a teapot while brewing coffee will yield you the "HTTP I'm a teapot" error message. IP over Avian Carriers.

    An Internet protocol for sending data packets using homing pigeons. A computer peripheral designed to emit smells for websites and emails, later named one of the "Worst Tech Products" by PC Magazine. How an image of a nude Playboy model became the industry-standard digital image compression test subject. Want to panic a Unix user? Display an error that their printer is on fire.

    Vintage Macintosh computers-turned- fishtanks. A water-based analogue computer used to model the United Kingdom economy, bringing a new meaning to the term liquidity. A academic paper which argues that computer programming should be understood as a branch of mathematics, and that the formal provability of a program is a major criterion for correctness. Spam filtering based on text strings can cause problems.

    A biblical-themed operating system designed by a single schizophrenic programmer over the course of 10 years. Trojan room coffee pot. The fascinating target of the world's first webcam: A 3D model which has become a standard reference object and something of an in-joke in the computer graphics community. A joke considered to be both "the world's funniest" and "the world's worst". Also a documentary of the same name. A unique experiment in "broadwebcasting", Bigipedia is the website on your radio.

    In association with Chianto—"Officially recognised by the EU as a wine-type product or by-product". A fictitious student officially enrolled at Georgia Tech in , and, except for his "service" in World War II, has been continuously enrolled at the school ever since. List of defunct amusement parks. A Hong Kong resident gets into an uncomfortably tense argument with a fellow passenger—all caught on video. A perennial parody of Conan the Barbarian that has appeared in film, television, comics, and fan fiction.

    Cultural depictions of Napoleon. It's not just Hello Kitty and Pikachu. A recent development in American popular culture in which the playful trope of the clown is rendered as disturbing through the use of dark humor and horror elements. Wherein a group of people quickly meet up, engage in a random action such as a pillow fight , then disappear just as quickly.

    Do your bit to save the rainforest —have an orgy! One of the latest trends to be popularized by hyphy culture. Bad weather isn't the only reason to avoid the summit of Mount Washington. The approving use of Nazi-era style, imagery, and paraphernalia in clothing and popular culture. New York got blown up by the Tsar Bomba! Well, at least you can do that in this. An activity in which assorted tricks are used to manipulate a pen in aesthetically pleasing ways. A French entertainer famous in Victorian times for being able to break wind at will.

    One tough guy who, to escape from death, cut off his own arm with a dull knife after a boulder fell on it. Popular jokes in India , based on stereotypes of Sikhs. List of school pranks. The fictitious mining of treacle molasses in a raw form similar to coal. The World Famous Bushman. You kids get off my lawn!

    A modern art piece created by Dada artist Marcel Duchamp. His sister, who mistook it for trash, threw it out. Chamber of Art and Curiosities. A larger-than-life, ton sculpture of a brontosaurus in the desert of Southern California west of Palm Springs. Dinny's companion is "Mr. Rex," a ton sculpture of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Fourth plinth, Trafalgar Square. An 18 foot, 13, pound concrete sculpture of a troll clutching a VW beetle located in Fremont. A giant straw Yuletide goat that is the target of frequent arson attacks and vandalism.

    Oxford man has had a foot 7. The entrance to Hell envisaged as the gaping mouth of a huge monster, an image which first appears in Anglo-Saxon art. An artist who attempted to draw the "Picture of Everything", a massive painting containing drawings of thousands of people and items, both real and imaginary. NY Hip hop graffiti knitters. A Picasso painting that purportedly would have sold for a record price had its owner, Steve Wynn , not accidentally poked a hole in it, and which eventually did sell for a different record price.

    Largest photographs in the world. List of fictional colors. Museum of Bad Art. Paintings by Adolf Hitler. The Nazi dictator and perpetrator of one of the worst genocides was also a painter. Used for plain tobacco packaging. Portland International Airport carpet. A Mexican sculptor who made a name for himself in ice and snow sculpture after winning gold at the Winter Olympics.

    There's also a "Holy Mackerel", Batman. Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism. A statue in Liverpool that's half-lamb, half-banana. An odd painting of a grinning face, that used to be on the Palace Amusements building in Asbury Park, New Jersey before it was demolished. Central Asian history has never been cuter.

    Osama bin Laden makes an appearance as a turban-wearing stray cat. Archie Meets the Punisher. The first applicant to be rejected from the Legion of Super-Heroes , his superpower was the ability to temporarily detach either arm and use it as a club with the other. A comic book character from none other than Vertigo Comics.

    Name of a Japanese manga comic whose subject matter is as surreal as its title. In animation , humour takes precedence over the ordinary laws of physics. A group of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons pulled from syndication due to their racist depictions of black people. A fictional family in the style of a Scottish clan , from which a great number of Walt Disney Company 's comic book characters held their origin..

    Donald Duck won an Oscar as a Hitler-saluting Nazi. A curious abundance of gorillas in comic book plots during the Silver Age of Comics. Homosexuality in the Batman franchise. For half a century, Batman and Dick Grayson have been rumored to have a relationship. An open-source webcomic character. Nothing says s in the USA more than a spinoff of Schoolhouse Rock with superheroes who teach the metric system.

    A Marvel Comics superhero with no special powers except immortality , who has been killed in ways including crushing, burning, self-impalement on giant novelty scissors, bear trap, cannon, chainsaw, piranhas, ferrets, spear, and python, and alcohol poisoning three times. Prone to fits of rage upon returning to life. Human- cephalopod sexual relations, popular in hentai.

    An animated series about everyone in the world's magical uncle and grandpa. Published in as a Victorian children's book and described as "a round game for merry parties", the object of the game was to quickly recite alphabetical tongue-twisting mock-Latin gibberish. A group of science fiction authors get together and deliberately write an absolutely horrible novel to fool and embarrass a " vanity publisher ".

    The Book of Heroic Failures. A book which glorifies failure. The book was a success and thus declared a "failure as a failure". La Bougie du Sapeur. A French newspaper published every February 29th. An essay written by Benjamin Franklin about flatulence. Writer of a 15,page manuscript along with several thousand watercolor paintings and other drawings illustrating the story, who rarely left his small room. His word was worth millions a few years after his death. Early American editions of The Hobbit. English As She Is Spoke. A 19th-century Portuguese — English conversational guide and phrase book that is regarded as a classic of unintentional humour since it was apparently the product of translating a Portuguese—French phrase book by non-English-speaking Portuguese with the help of a French—English phrase book.

    An infamously bad heroic fantasy novella , written in by Jim Theis and circulated anonymously in science fiction fandom since then. Supposedly the shortest story possible in the English language, though Ernest Hemingway had nothing to do with it. At the start of the 16th century, British schoolmasters were insulting one another.

    In Latin, of course. A non-existent novel that was the subject of a hoax intended to criticize the manner in which best-seller lists are determined. A poem written by a Chinese poet in Classical Chinese. It can be read and understood by all who understand the language, even though it consists entirely of the word "shi" repeated 92 times in different tones. List of works with the subtitle "Virtue Rewarded". A racist stock character who helps out white protagonists. A theory which states that Christopher Marlowe 's unnatural death was a hoax and that he continued to write and publish under the pseudonym " William Shakespeare ".

    A homoerotic homophonic translation of Homer: A day, O Achilles. The Meaning of Hitler. My Immortal fan fiction. Rowling 's wizarding world. Someone who may have been the author of the piece almost got a major publishing deal for her memoirs. Naked Came the Stranger. Journalists prove a point when their intentionally awful sex novel becomes a bestseller. Later the basis of a porn film starring Darby Lloyd Rains. Order of the Occult Hand. A very serious essay by Harry Frankfurt sketching a philosophical theory of, well, bullshit. Political interpretations of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

    Understanding the political context of the mid-to-late s in the United States will give you a different understanding of the gold, silver and emerald symbolism, among other things. It doesn't cover music, but does list the names of alleged homosexuals, calling for their deaths. The McGonagall of prose. Lewis competed as to who could read her longest without laughing. A great conspiracy that concealed the identity of the true author of "Shakespeare's" works, implying that all contemporary references to Shakespeare's authorship were fraudulent or mistaken.

    Anti-Stratfordians can take heart that there really are works attributed to Shakespeare that weren't written by him! Angus McDiarmad, a native Scots-Gaelic speaker, writes a book on a Scottish Highland area with the help of an English dictionary to great comic effect and is termed "the world's worst author". Le Train de Nulle Part. A number of prominent musicians have died at this age, though statisticians attribute the "club" to apophenia - seeing patterns in random data. See also the related white lighter myth.

    A three-piece movement composed by John Cage in which the musicians are instructed to not play a single note. The practice of taking lyrics of foreign songs, "mishearing" them into English, and producing a Flash video to go along with it. As Slow As Possible. A piece of music by John Cage to be performed until What happens to Wikipedia article titles when two different bands with the same exact name both release self-titled albums. The Boy Bands Have Won. As of August , it holds the record for the longest album title. The term was invented to make fun of music journalists and bloggers who hype "the next big thing".

    Ironically, they then wrote about chillwave as "the next big thing". The ancestor of Vaporwave. An entire record by Green Day whose master tracks were stolen. The very complicated story of the Beach Boys ' " teenage symphony to God ", an album of psychedelic children's songs about spiritual rebirth , American imperialism , cartoons, and exercising.

    The superstition that any composer of symphonies, from Beethoven onwards, will die soon after writing their own Ninth Symphony. Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse Present: Dark Night of the Soul. Dark Side of the Rainbow. The Belgian entry of the Eurovision Song Contest whose lyrics spoke precisely of the event in which they took part.

    That time John Fogerty was sued for sounding like himself. The organizers spent so much money promoting the event that they ran out of money to spend on the actual event. They were later faced with eight lawsuits. That time a receptionist convinced The New York Times that "wack slacks" was slang for ripped jeans and "lamestain" meant an uncool person. A pianist who had many doctored recordings falsely attributed to her long after she stopped performing in public. A string quartet by Karlheinz Stockhausen that must be played in four circling helicopters , the sound remixed, chopper sounds and all, for an audience on the ground.

    Mercurial hippie outcast of the Hollywood music biz that never received financial compensation for his songs and records. Thought to be dead after the s, but then resurfaced with a blog in aiming to set the record straight about his life story. Jeg har set en rigtig negermand. A Danish 1 single from , extolling the virtues of racial equality while calling a "negro man" "black as a bucket of tar".

    An American soprano famous for her singing ability or lack thereof. Leck mich im Arsch. Never officially released, and yet fans and critics can argue that it's the best "album" by the Dave Matthews Band. List of musical works in unusual time signatures. What's the most absurd time signature you can imagine? List of silent musical compositions. Not to be confused with " The Sound of Silence ", these songs don't have really much to hear.

    List of songs topping polls for worst songs. What happens when you replace the lyrics in a music video with lyrics that describe what's actually happening in the music video? A album by Lou Reed that consists of 64 minutes of audio feedback , widely believed to have either been an elaborate joke, or an attempt by Reed to escape from a record label contract. A blind composer, theoretician, poet, and inventor of musical instruments who dressed like a viking and lived as a street musician in New York between the s to s.

    A one-man band who has self-released over albums through his home-based mailing service since Later noted as a pioneer of lo-fi music and indie rock. The Most Unwanted Song. Featuring operatic rapping, a children's choir urging listeners to go to Wal-Mart , bagpipes, cowboy music, and political slogans shouted through a bullhorn. A system written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , in which the musical piece is decided randomly by playing dice.

    This album by Jean-Michel Jarre had only a single copy produced, which was then auctioned off like a painting. The master tapes were subsequently destroyed, making the copy unique. You can get killed for singing Frank Sinatra 's signature tune in the Philippines. The Beach Boys' collaboration with Charles Manson. Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah. The whimsical universe surrounding the P Funk all stars. Was Paul McCartney replaced by a lookalike in the s? Take an unfinished studio album, hold a press conference at Kmart , and put on a show in countries around the world, complete with a spinning mirrorball lemon, a giant martini olive, a large golden arch, and the largest video screen ever toured.

    That would be U2 's —98 tour in a nutshell. As part of a crackdown on drug cartels in Rio de Janeiro , this uniquely Brazilian form of gangsta rap cannot legally be performed or broadcast on the radio. A mystery wrapped in an enigma related to Pink Floyd , which has remained unsolved since it appeared on Usenet in A song mentioned in a top songs list of a notable magazine, that was long-believed by some to be non-existent because collectors were unable to find a recording or further information on it until 33 years after it was written.

    None of this band's members really wanted to form a band, nor did they really have any musical talent, but hey, a fortune teller predicted success, so off they went William Shatner's musical career. His rendition of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds regularly wins radio station competitions to find the "worst music of all time". To Anacreon in Heaven. An 18th-century drinking song whose melody was later adopted for " The Star-Spangled Banner ". Unbelievably, the band's name was purely coincidental.

    An instrument in Newfoundland , an insult everywhere else. Abrasive single by Cornish electronic musician Richard D. James, otherwise known as Aphex Twin. At a full 1. A rock band made up of elderly musicians. As of [update] , the oldest member had lived to An Alan Smithee Film: A movie about a director who makes a bad movie, but can't remove his name from the credits because his real name is Alan Smithee.

    In reality, the movie about the movie was so bad that director Arthur Hiller was credited as Alan Smithee to disguise himself from the production. A film scheduled to be released on New Year's Eve that is planned to be 30 days long. A trailer released in lasted 7 hours 20 minutes, and another one due in is expected to last three days.

    It is then planned for the film to be destroyed after its sole showing. A mysterious object usually of extraterrestrial origin in a film that is there simply to cause a sense of wonder. The answer to the question: What could be worse than a Sharknado? A completed feature-length film with Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd that has never been released and may never be released. The best way to keep the paparazzi away from your movie: