Is your vote really a choice?

More and more evidence indicates that human beings make decisions based on emotion even when we think we’re using logic.

The latest evidence comes from Virginia Tech, where Professor Read Montague placed his test subjects in a brain imaging scanner and, without telling them why, he showed them a series of pictures ranging from cheerful to disgusting.

“The positive ones are fuzzy bunnies and sailboats. The negative ones are flies on salad, dead bodies,” said Montague.

Then after recording their unconscious brain scans, and again without telling them why, he asked for their conscious reactions to a series of words.

“So you might say something like ‘abortion,’ ‘gun control,’ ‘gay marriage.'”

The words, as it turns out, were part of a standard test that assesses how liberal or conservative you are.
And finally, he looked for a relationship between each person’s unconscious brain response and their politics.

Montague was shocked.

The unconscious response to the disgusting images turned out to be much more intense among conservatives than liberals. To the point that he could predict each person’s politics by looking at their brain scans.

“It was so strong that we could look at the response of your brain to the first negative image that you saw and still be in the mid-90s in terms of accuracy,” he said.

This response appears to be inherited. We are apparently born seeing the world in a certain way.

All of which tells me, those of you who may be feeling judgmental about how your neighbors voted should consider that, like sexual orientation, political orientation may not be a choice after all.