How hunger makes you support the welfare state

[link to www.dailymail.co.uk]

People who are hungry are more inclined to support of the welfare state policies that help the poor, new research suggests.

The extraordinary results of a Danish study suggest that the state of our bodies has a significant influence on our position on specific political issues.

The researchers behind the study say their findings could revolutionise perceptions of how people come to adopt a political stance, with our ideological views apparently swayed by basic biology.

That's in direct contradiction to the Enlightenment view that people make up their minds about politics by considering their options and carefully and weighing the pros and cons.

However, a supplementary study by the same team found that being hungry did not make people more generous with their own money - hunger only made participants like the idea of other people sharing.

The researchers said people's support for apparently altruistic policies of wealth redistribution is thus not so much a reflection of concern for the poor but 'rather a strategy for securing further resources for themselves.'

Assistant professor Michael Bang Petersen of Aarhus University said that in order to understand the influence the state of our bodies has on our positino on specific political issues, we must look to the origin of our species.

Politics also existed in the communities of our ancestors, the hunters and gatherers who roamed the East African savannah, and their ways of handling things have left a mark on us today, he said.