Definition
Political orientation is a person's position on the broad left-right spectrum — their cluster of attitudes toward authority, change, hierarchy, and the boundaries of the group. It is treated in Behave not just as a set of opinions but as a window onto deeper styles of thinking and feeling.
Sapolsky reviews evidence that orientation correlates with measurable psychological traits: tolerance for ambiguity, sensitivity to threat, openness to novelty, and the intensity of disgust responses.
Why it matters
How it works
Behave summarizes studies in which subjects' implicit reactions — how quickly they register a threatening image, how strongly they react to something disgusting — predict their politics better than they themselves expect. Orientation, on this account, is downstream of temperament: the same person's affective defaults shape both how they feel about a spider and how they feel about social change.
This does not make politics purely biological. Culture, experience, and reasoning all matter. But the framing explains why political debate so often fails to move people: the disagreement is anchored in differing gut responses, not only in differing facts. Recognizing the dispositional layer makes cross-aisle persuasion a problem of emotion as much as logic.