American dreams

[tigerfort]

Following on from various coverage of the current American pre-presidential excitement, I was interested to read recently (in Counting Sheep, Paul Martin's excellent book on the 'science and pleasures of sleep') that Republican supporters were three times more likely to experience nightmares than their less conservative Democratic opponents. Even the non-nightmare dreams that Republicans reported were generally more frightening and more aggressive in content.

So do paranoia and aggressive instincts cause Republican voting, or are they its effect?

Comments

[emily-shore.livejournal.com]

What a fascinating statistic. Thanks for sharing that.

[mobbsy.livejournal.com]

I'd guess neither cause nor effect, just correlation.

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

Well, yes. But being snarky was more fun, and I'd had a hard day.

Not really a fan of this sort of study

[overconvergent.livejournal.com]

My personal favourite quote on this subject, tbh, was that of a sceptic who said "I think the next study will assert that conservatives have [smaller male members]".