Nicholas Kristof had an interesting column in Sunday's NY Times about liberals, conservatives, spanking and brain wiring.
Unfortunately, he misunderstands the idea of "hard wiring," and how flexible the brain is during development. He cites research that finds that conservatives have a more easily triggered startle response -- and have a greater emotional response to disgust, as measured by changes in electrical activity on the skin, known as "skin conductance." (Skin conductance is one of the measures used in "lie detector" tests).
Kristof takes this to mean that liberals and conservatives are "born that way," and that these differences may make political argument relatively fruitless.
He writes:
I moaned to the scholars that their research was utterly dispiriting for those of us in the opinion business. After all, it's extra challenging to try to change people's minds if they may not even share our hard-wiring. Are people who are "wrong" on the issues beyond redemption, because of their physiological inability to help themselves?
Professors Hetherington and Smith dismissed my whining and were more sanguine. For starters, they note that physiological differences are probably found among the extremes on each side, while political battles are fought in the middle. Indeed, these studies may be useful in determining what arguments to deploy against the other side.
But the column misses an even bigger problem with the idea of "hard wiring" itself. As Bruce Perry, MD, PhD and I discuss in our forthcoming book, Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential-- And Endangered and in The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, startle responses and skin conductance offer insight into what's going on in the brain's stress response system.
While there are genetic tendencies that affect these systems, they are also highly responsive to early life experience. If that experience is nurturing and empathetic, the system will wire up one way; if it is harsh and frightening, the same genes will produce a very different wiring.
Kristof appears to assume that these tendencies are inborn -- but in fact, research shows that traumatic experience in particular can profoundly affect startle response and skin conductance.
Curiously, Kristof also cites other research that finds that states where parents discipline their children by spanking tend to be more conservative -- but he fails to realize that this notion undermines the "hard wiring" idea and suggests that an environmental factor makes a big difference.
If you discipline your children in ways that are stressful to them, their stress response systems will change. Children may become more fearful and often, they will have a more easily triggered startle response. If this type of response is linked to conservative political views, the relationship is at least as likely to be due to the environmental experience as it is to some genetic factor. And that means that it's far more open to change than this column would suggest.
And that's good news whether you are a liberal or a conservative!
Cross Posted from our new Born for Love Blog at Psychology Today, which looks at empathy, the brain and society and is co-written with leading child trauma expert Bruce Perry, MD, PhD Follow us on Twitter @bornforlove