The effect of alcohol on political views

You could start off with this:

"Libertarians consistently come out as the most cerebral, most rational, and least emotional. On a very crude problem solving measure related to IQ, they score the highest. Libertarians, more than liberals or conservatives, have the capacity to reason their way to their ideology." 

From: Jonathan Haidt: The Largest Study Ever of Libertarian Psychology.

Then perhaps even read the whole study here, at which point you could then turn your attention to the New Scientist, where you might get a chance to meet some members of the above mentioned mindset, but certainly pretty ordinary people from all walks of life in a night-life setting.

If you’ve ever talked politics in the pub near closing time, chances are it wasn’t an especially enlightened or right-on discussion. When researchers in the US loitered outside a bar in New England and asked customers about their political views, they found that the drunker the punter, the more right wing their leanings. That wasn’t because right-wing people drink more, or get pissed more easily. Wherever people stood on the political spectrum when sober, alcohol shifted their views to the right. 

Why might that be? The researchers, led by Scott Eidelman at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, point out that alcohol strips away complex reasoning to reveal the default state of the mind. And that is why they were chatting to drunks: they were using drunkenness to test the hypothesis that low-effort, automatic thought promotes political conservatism... 

That’s not to say that conservatives are less intelligent. The relationship between IQ and political leanings is complex. Broadly speaking, people with lower-than-average IQs tend to be lefties. probably out of economic self-interest. People of moderately above-average intelligence lean right for the same reason. And the top 20 per cent swing left again although highly intelligent people are also over-represented in the libertarian camp, which defies simple left-right categorisation.

Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism

Abstract

The authors test the hypothesis that low-effort thought promotes political conservatism. In Study 1, alcohol intoxication was measured among bar patrons; as blood alcohol level increased, so did political conservatism (controlling for sex, education, and political identification). In Study 2, participants under cognitive load reported more conservative attitudes than their no-load counterparts. In Study 3, time pressure increased participants’ endorsement of conservative terms. In Study 4, participants considering political terms in a cursory manner endorsed conservative terms more than those asked to cogitate; an indicator of effortful thought (recognition memory) partially mediated the relationship between processing effort and conservatism. Together these data suggest that political conservatism may be a process consequence of low-effort thought; when effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases.


The logical, but surprising conclusion of this noted study is that most journalists are conservatives: At night! (some even earlier).