"I've never checked it but experience, guessing you have some of the same, suggests they don't go hand in hand."
Now we're back to nurture VS nature.
This is HIDDEN BRAIN. I'm Shankar Vedantam. We start today with an account of two communities. One is liberal, the other conservative. I want you to guess which is which.
JOHN HIBBING: The schools would stress patriotism and respect. And it would be a very rules-based educational system. The houses would be fairly similar. The lawns would be very nicely kept and beautifully green and mowed. The town would be quiet, with lots of churches.
VEDANTAM: That's town one. Here's town two.
HIBBING: The schools would be based more on experiential kinds of things rather than rote memory. People would prefer older houses with wooden floors rather than wall-to-wall carpeting. They would keep the yards natural - lots of bars and community theaters and foreign films, more of those than churches.
VEDANTAM: That was easy, right? Conservatives like order. Liberals embrace ambiguity. Now, you may be rolling your eyes or even getting angry at these stereotypes. But we all know there's more than a grain of truth to them. So how did these two towns, which our guest today refers to as Liberalville (ph) and Conservaton (ph), get this way?
When most of us think about how we came to our political views, we tend to have a straightforward explanation. We use our upbringing and life experiences as the basis for our political beliefs. We imagine that our parents, teachers and friends shape our views on everything, from taxes and the economy to immigration and national security.
But what if I told you there is something deeper to those attitudes, drives that shape the music we listen to, the food we eat, the politicians we elect? This week on HIDDEN BRAIN, how the partisan divide in our country might arise not just from our upbringing and lived experiences, but from biology.
VEDANTAM: What would you say to critics who would say, you know, the argument that psychological traits and biological differences are beneath our deep political conflicts doesn't make sense because we didn't always have this deep divide in our country between liberals and conservatives.
There was a time when we had many, many more people in the center. The most liberal Republican was often to the left of the most conservative Democrat. And, you know, there really has been a sorting of the political parties in recent years. What explains this change, especially over the last 20, 30 years?
HIBBING: What I would say to that argument is that I believe we have always had this very same division, this very basic difference between people who are fairly sensitive to threats and think we need to be vigilant and those people who are more into experimentation and trying new things.
Ralph Waldo Emerson has a great quote, and I'm sorry I can't give it to you verbatim. But it's basically that the division between those people who are supporters of tradition and those people who are supportive of innovation is very old and has structured the world since time began
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