The April 17-23, 2010 issue of New Scientist magazine has an article entitled "No fear of strangers, no racial prejudice" by Andy Coghlan. Sorry, I couldn’t find a link on their web site, but here is the gist:
Children with a rare genetic condition seem to lack any kind of racial bias, unlike any other children previously tested. These children are also unusually gregarious and unafraid of strangers, leading to the suggestion that fear of people who are different from ourselves underlies racial prejudice.
These children have a rare genetic disorder called Williams syndrome (Website: Williams-Syndrome.org). Researchers (led by Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg of the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany) hypothesized that since reduced activity in the amygdale links to lack of fear and racial bias in adults links to overactivity in the amygdale, these children would show less racial bias. Compared to developmentally normal children, children with Williams showed no bias for skin color in testing.
Surprisingly, the Williams children displayed the same gender biases as other children, with boys loading praise onto male characters and girls favouring the females.
This may indicate that different prejudices have different bases. The researchers claim that this research does not imply whether racial stereotyping is innate or learned.
Now consider this article from Psychology Today by Jay Dixit: (complete article link below - I can't make it go here so to hell with it!):
Psychologists John Jost of New York University, Dana Carney of Harvard, and Sam Gosling of the University of Texas have demonstrated that conservatives and liberals boast markedly different home and office decor. Liberals are messier than conservatives, their rooms have more clutter and more color, and they tend to have more travel documents, maps of other countries, and flags from around the world. Conservatives are neater, and their rooms are cleaner, better organized, more brightly lit, and more conventional. Liberals have more books, and their books cover a greater variety of topics. And that's just a start. Multiple studies find that liberals are more optimistic. Conservatives are more likely to be religious. Liberals are more likely to like classical music and jazz, conservatives, country music. Liberals are more likely to enjoy abstract art. Conservative men are more likely than liberal men to prefer conventional forms of entertainment like TV and talk radio. Liberal men like romantic comedies more than conservative men. Liberal women are more likely than conservative women to enjoy books, poetry, writing in a diary, acting, and playing musical instruments.
(snip)
As kids, liberals had developed close relationships with peers and were rated by their teachers as self-reliant, energetic, impulsive, and resilient. People who were conservative at age 23 had been described by their teachers as easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and vulnerable at age 3. The reason for the difference, the Blocks hypothesized, was that insecure kids most needed the reassurance of tradition and authority, and they found it in conservative politics.
I guess it is all about the FEAR! FIRE, FOES, AWAKE!
The Ideological Animal