It's important to note that the original paper (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/ejsp.2315/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/e

It's important to note that the original paper (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/ejsp.2315/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/ejsp.2315/fu... - sadly behind a paywall, though it may or may not be available on scihub) specifically caveats the finding as only related to social progressivism, not economic: > As predicted, making Republican participants feel physically safe increased their liberalism on social issues, but their stance on economic issues was unaffected. Contrary to predictions, however, Democrat participants’ attitudes (both social and economic) were unaffected by the prime. This is presumably because Democrats (and liberals) are chronically lower on threat perceptions than Republicans (and conservatives). This pattern of results mirrors that found in prior work, which has shown that experimentally inducing threat does not affect conservatives’ responses, but causes “liberals to think like conservatives” (Nail et al., 2009). Still an important result and (IMO) something worth researching further (EDIT: especially given questionable replicability of the researcher's previous work, as posted by other commenters in this thread), but less impactful.