Mechanized identification of political orientation.

Otherwise know as, machine for sorting which work camp you get stuck in.

This Machine Can Tell Whether You're Liberal or Conservative

At the center of the research are many scholars working at the intersection of psychology, biology, and politics, but one leader in the field is John Hibbing, a political scientist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln whose "Political Physiology Laboratory" has been producing some pretty stunning results.
"We know that liberals and conservatives are really deeply different on a variety of things," Hibbing explains on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast (stream above). "It runs from their tastes, to their cognitive patterns—how they think about things, what they pay attention to—to their physical reactions. We can measure their sympathetic nervous systems, which is the fight-or-flight system. And liberals and conservatives tend to respond very differently." 

It all adds up, according to Hibbing, to what he calls a "negativity bias" on the right. Conservatives, Hibbing's research suggests, go through the world more attentive to negative, threatening, and disgusting stimuli—and then they adopt tough, defensive and aversive ideologies to match that perceived reality.

Yeah, I know. Very scientific and all that. We measure galvanic skin response, do a little fancy footwork with some eye tracking and pupil dilation, and SHAZAM!, Conservatives have a built-in biological "negativity bias". And negativity is bad my friends, because its, like, negative.

Oh, and its hereditary. Where have I heard that before?

Oh right, now I remember.

Here's another outfit that puts a lot of stock in galvanic skin response: Scientology. Again, real scientific.

Closing bit is the best part, really.

So how do we then live with the other side—with those who disagree with us, for reasons over which they may not have full control? Hibbing believes that understanding that you don't fully control your political orientation, any more than you do your sexual orientation or your left-hand/right-hand orientation, promotes political tolerance. "My dad was left-handed," says Hibbing, "and he got beat on the hand with a ruler when he was a kid." Nowadays, Hibbing continues, that would never happen—we've grown much more tolerant because we recognize that left-handed is just the way some people are.
So maybe the same can happen for politics. "We have this silly and naive hope, maybe it's more than that," says Hibbing, "that if we could get people to see politics in the same light [as left-handedness], then maybe we would be a little bit more tolerant, and there will be a greater opportunity for compromise."

Yeah, its the hope that Conservatives will just roll over and do what they're told like good little Untermenschen. Or more likely the Left will "regretfully" default to doing what they always do, just assert their own superiority and kill anybody who disagrees.

More in sorrow than in anger you know, but it just has to be done. Its for their own good really, poor things. They just can't help that they have a natural negativity bias.

Update: Welcome SDA readers and other flying monkeys!