ArticleNature human behaviour2020
Conservatives and liberals have similar physiological responses to threats.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 29 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
29 citing papers in PubMed.
- Politics embodied: How politics shapes and is shaped by the bodily experience of emotions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Fight, Flight, or Vote Right? A Systematic Review of Threat Sensitivity in Political Conservatism.Brain sciences · 2025Review
- Article
- Political Attitudes and Disease Threat: Regional Pathogen Stress Is Associated With Conservative Ideology Only for Older Individuals.Personality & social psychology bulletin · 2024Article
- Article
- Negative online news articles are shared more to social media.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Putting the affect into affective polarisation.Cognition & emotion · 2024Review
- The threat sensitivity scale: A brief self-report measure of dispositional sensitivity toward perceiving threats to physical harm.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Manifestations, social impact, and decay of conceptual beliefs: A cultural perspective.Brain and behavior · 2024Article
- Scenario-Based Messages on Social Media Motivate COVID-19 Information Seeking.Journal of applied research in memory and cognition · 2024Article
- In masks we trust: explicit and implicit reactions to masked faces vary by political orientation.BMC psychology · 2024Article
- Tone in politics is not systematically related to macro trends, ideology, or experience.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Article
- Yikes! The Effect of Incidental Disgust and Information on Public Attitudes During the COVID-19 Pandemic.Political psychology · 2022Article
- Persuading republicans and democrats to comply with mask wearing: An intervention tournament.Journal of experimental social psychology · 2022Article
- A Psychology of Ideology: Unpacking the Psychological Structure of Ideological Thinking.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2022Article
- Negativity bias, personality and political ideology.Nature human behaviour · 2022Article
- The polarized mind in context: Interdisciplinary approaches to the psychology of political polarization.The American psychologist · 2022Article
- Trust in scientific information mediates associations between conservatism and coronavirus responses in the U.S., but few other nations.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Is negativity bias intuitive for liberals and conservatives?Current psychology (New Brunswick, N.J.) · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
About a decade ago, a study documented that conservatives have stronger physiological responses to threatening stimuli than liberals. This work launched an approach aimed at uncovering the biological roots of ideology. Despite wide-ranging scientific and popular impact, independent laboratories have not replicated the study. We conducted a pre-registered direct replication (n = 202) and conceptual replications in the United States (n = 352) and the Netherlands (n = 81). Our analyses do not support the conclusions of the original study, nor do we find evidence for broader claims regarding the effect of disgust and the existence of a physiological trait. Rather than studying unconscious responses as the real predispositions, alignment between conscious and unconscious responses promises deeper insights into the emotional roots of ideology.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.