Tag: Kevin Smith

You talked politics with your mother, brother, bartender and banker, and all it did was jack up your blood pressure. In this divisive period in American politics, two professors in Nebraska and one in California decided to conduct a survey in March 2017 to see how pervasive were high stress, conflict with family and friends, and even health problems related to thinking and talking about politics. The three — Kevin Smith and John Hibbing, political science professors at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Hibbing’s son, Matthew, an associate professor at the University of California, Merced — wrote a paper on their findings last year. 31.8% said exposure to media outlets promoting a contrary view “can drive me crazy.” 29.3% said they had lost their temper because of politics. 25.6% said they spend more time thinking about politics than they want to. 23.3% said politics compelled them to think seriously about moving. About 800 people took the survey through YouGov, a polling firm that recruited a demographically representative sample of American adults for the survey. Sign up for World-Herald news alerts Be the first to know when news happens. Get the latest breaking headlines sent straight to your inbox. Hibbing hopes to continue the survey through the years to make comparisons.

John Hibbing’s political research is bipartisan in that it aggravates both sides of the aisle. “Our research is not really very popular,” Hibbing said. Hibbing is branching off from their research about conservatives and liberals and is preparing to collect data about President Trump’s supporters in order to study how they differ from other conservatives. “There are these nationalist, nativist concept leaders everywhere,” Hibbing said. “So, I thought having access to Trump supporters and really digging in deep to figure out what’s going on with them would help us understand these kinds of populist, nativist movements.” A company will send out Hibbing’s survey at the beginning of February, and he said he will analyze the data to better understand Trump supporters. “I think a lot of their policy attitudes are not necessarily driven by ‘Oh my God, the Mongol hordes are coming to get us,’” Hibbing said. The data collected about a participant’s physical symptoms could have many different meanings, so Hibbing is careful not to make generalizations about conservatives or liberals as a whole. Both Hibbing and Smith understand their research will not change the polarized political environment, but Smith said he thought it would help people understand that other people’s political beliefs were based on biology and not the “wrong” opinion. “Maybe I’m not 100 percent correct. People thought I was crazy for turning down other, maybe higher-ranked, universities, but I’d do it again in a heartbeat.” Smith said the team will continue to conduct research on the physiological differences between conservatives and liberals.