Recent research by Dr. Thaddeus Whoopenhoffer, at the University of Oranjestad, suggests that there may be more behind our current political terminology than just semantics. 

While doing an unrelated study, one of Dr. Whoopenhoffer’s graduate students noticed that a high percentage of those people we generally associate with liberal thinking were left handed.  Among these are Albert Einstein, Jimi Hendrix, Leonardo Da Vinci, Michaelangelo, Ophrah Winfrey, Paul McCartney, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama.

The graduate student extended her study to more than 75,000 subjects, both living and dead, and from that study Dr. Whoopenhoffer was able to concluded that individuals who adhere to conservative politics are more than likely to be right handed, whereas those who claim to be liberal tend to be left handed.  Says Whoopenhoffer, “It is becoming increasingly obvious that there is more to political ideology than social indoctrination.”

Based on Whoopenhoffer’s studies, Dr. Ivan Tupidsay of the University of Milan, further concluded that the left / right inclination extends beyond politics and into religion.  Those who indicate a preference toward conservative religious beliefs tend to be right handed, whereas those who claim no religious affiliation, including Agnosticism, Deism, and Atheism, are generally left handed.  “Of course,” states Tupidsay, “this shouldn’t be too surprising, considering the close affinity of religion and politics.”

Tupidsay was quick to point out that hasty judgments based on handedness should be avoided.  “It was common for parents and especially schools to assume young children were right-handed.  Even when they may have shown a preference to left-handedness, teachers often forced students to learn to write with their right hands.”  Tupidsay went on to say that whereas this practice was common up into the 1970s, there are still wide-scale instances of its happening even today.   Therefore, stated Tupidsay, “...it may be virtually impossible to truly determine political and religious affinity based solely on handedness. “

This led Dr. Tupidsay to explore different vinues to determine if there were other subconscious acts that might indicate a person’s true political and religious inclination.  To that end, Tupidsay studied over 200 individuals in the spring of 2005.  Subjects, who believed they were doing a study on tactile memory, initially filled out a questionnaire that, among other things asked their personal views on the religion and politics.  They were then instructed to reach into a box that contained several specifically shaped objects, such as arrows, half curves, and fish, and, without looking, to grab whichever object their hand first came in contact with.  Then they were to place that object on the table in front of them.  It was found, Tupidsay concluded, “that whichever way the fish would go would be a direct determinant of that individual’s stated political and religious preference.  If it pointed to the left, she or he was liberal.  To the right meant she or he was conservative.”

Noted researcher Mandrake Chapman initially questioned the validity of Tupidsay’s research, stating that, as a result of their lifelong indoctrination, individuals will often claim to be a liberal or a conservative, when, in fact, they’re not.  Therefore, any study that would gain such information volutarily from the subjects was immediately suspect.

So, in 2008, Chapman further refined and confirmed Tupidsay’s initial study.  Chapman deveolped a Likert test designed to measure such core beliefs as the existence of an all-knowing creator, capital punishment, gun control, abortion, and social intervention.  Through these questions, each stated numerous times in a variety of ways, Chapman concluded that it was possible to determine the subconscious religious and political inclinations of any given subject.  1,217 subjects were subsequently tested.  The subjects, who weren’t aware that they were participating in the specific study, were all coded, along with their test results, so that no one knew what their actual political and religious inclination was.  These subjects were then asked to do a variety of tests, such as drawing an arrow on a piece of paper.  The results were astounding.  When the subjects’ personality tests were matched with their clinical test results, it was found that 86% of the time (with a 3% +/- margin of error) the subjects would draw the arrow pointing toward the direction they favored politically or religiously.  Therefore, the direction that a subject would point an object, such as an arrow or the head of a fish, would subconsciously indicate whether that individual was a liberal or a conservative, regardless of what beliefs that individual might actually profess.

Perhaps Dr. Whoopenhoffer summed it up best when he stated,  “I’d be reluctant to say that there is such thing as a liberal gene, but there’s definitely something there.”

Further research is currently underway as to whether such knowledge would affect the conscious decision making processes of those who have incorporated beliefs systems into the core values that go counter to their subconscious inclinations.