In the middle of a NYT column explaining research into human psychology: "It had no effect on people who identified as liberal."

So there's this supposedly serious research into how the mind works, explained by an academic, Jessica Stern, a professor at Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Studies:

[T]he experimental psychologists Tom Pyszczynski, Sheldon Solomon and Jeff Greenberg are known for having developed what’s called terror management theory, which which suggests that much of human behavior is motivated by an unconscious terror of death. What saves us from this terror is culture. Cultures provide ways to view the world that “solve” the existential crisis engendered by the awareness of death.

The theory says that when people are reminded of their mortality — especially if the reminder doesn’t register consciously, as happens after a brutal act of terror — they will more readily enforce their cultural worldviews. If our cultural worldview is xenophobic, nationalistic or moralistic, we are prone to become more so. Hundreds of experiments, all over the world, have confirmed these findings.

If we believe guns will protect us from harm, a terrorist strike will further strengthen our views. If we blame Muslims or white supremacists or the government for whatever is wrong in our world, we will become more fearful and more certain about who is to blame. For example, psychological experiments found that being reminded both of one’s own mortality and the attacks of Sept. 11 increased support for military interventions in the Middle East among people who identified as politically conservative. It had no effect on people who identified as liberal.

The column goes on to other subjects, so I was brought up short. What kind of serious scientific research — hundreds of experiments, all over the world — produces a finding about how the human mind works and sees a complete exemption for liberals? No effect!

I haven't read the research, but it's possible that the liberal mind is fundamentally different from the rest of us humans.

Maybe whether or not you are liberal is the most basic thing going on inside us. The unconscious terror of death, the instinctive resort to cultural worldviews, the hardening of resolve to protect and fight — maybe that happens in some people and not others and the others are those who identify as liberal.

Maybe that's how you know you're a liberal: You watched the planes hit the towers, the people hanging out the windows begging for help, the horrible collapse, and you thought, this is a complex phenomenon, and we must contemplate the reasons why this is happening and take care not to do anything rash.