Authoritarian conservatives, but not liberals, responded more rapidly to threatening words like “cancer,” “snake,” or “mugger” than to nonthreatening words (e.g., “telescope,” “tree,” “canteen”). Moreover, as compared with liberals, such conservatives are more likely to associate “arms” with “weapons” (rather than with “legs”), more likely to interpret ambiguous faces as threatening, and more easily conditioned to associate negative (but not positive) stimuli with neutral stimuli.
