How do we arrive at our political beliefs? - Part 2 - emotions and politics

Why are we so emotional about our political beliefs?  Brain science has recently been finding that all our decisions are grounded in emotions.  We would be frozen with indecision choosing the color socks to buy if we don't have some emotional response to rescue us.

For most of us, once we adopt a particular political ideology and incorporate it into systems of thought to enable quick decision making we, in effect, dump that ideology into a bin in our emotions labeled "this is true."  Intellectual growth is largely about testing and revising those emotional responses in our "this is true" bin.

We often have our prototype political views in place late in childhood.  Then puberty hits and for decades thereafter our time and attention is monopolized by relationships, careers, families.  So we seldom have time to go through the process of really analyzing whether what we are emotionally attached to makes sense.  So we make our political decisions by just dipping into our "this is true" bin.

The "this is true" bin items get tested only when some strong negative emotion gets identified with the particular belief or it contradicts some other idea for which we have a strong emotional attachment.

My anecdotal experience suggests that our choice of career can effect the degree to which we challenge the political beliefs in our "this is true bin".   Some move into people oriented careers where the knowledge they depend on to make their living will from time to time contradict their political ideas, so the emotional attachment to making a living provides the emotional impetus we need to revise our political ideas.  But in my experience it seems like folks that move into careers that are not people oriented - hard science, Doctors, Dentists, Chemists, or business careers like farming or manufacturing, seldom have the sorts of people oriented experiences that provide the emotionally charged contradictory ideas that would jolt them out of their political emotional comfort zone.  The most politically ideological people I have known in my life have usually been from some career that is focused on understanding things, not people.   However I have never encountered any data to verify or contradict this tentative observation.

If the observation is true it raises the chicken or egg question.  Do people choose the career depending on whether they are more comfortable with the definitive nature of things or the ambiguity of human interaction?  Are we back to the impact of Oxytocin?