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.

‘Over the course of human evolutionary history, a critical issue has always been to secure enough food,’ said Dr Petersen.

‘We human animals, who live in groups and are exceptionally skilled at managing social situations, always have one extraordinary option if the hunt should fail: we can ask the more fortunate people to share their spoils with us.

‘And if we are we to believe a number of anthropological studies, this is precisely what people do across the globe.’

He goes on: ‘The point is that our political opinions are determined by rationality, but it is a rational impulse that has been passed on to us from our ancestors.’

His colleague, Assistant Professor Lene Aarøe, explained how they reached their findings.

‘We asked a group of test subjects to fast for four hours after which we gave them a Sprite or a sugar free Sprite Zero. One group had high blood sugar levels, while the other group had low blood sugar,’ she said.

Participants were then asked whether they agreed with political statements such as: ‘We should increase the amount received by social welfare recipients,’ or ‘Many people get social welfare without really needing it,’ reported The Times.

‘The results show that the group with low blood sugar levels were more inclined to support a left-wing welfare policy than the group with high blood sugar counts.

‘This challenges the traditional notion of what influences us when we take a stance on questions such as modern welfare.’

But the Danish team’s supplementary work showed that there was an unconscious hidden agenda behind this apparent support for sharing and caring.

In this experiment, assistant professors Aarøe and Petersen first asked the test subjects to state their position regarding the welfare state – then they gave them money, which they could choose to keep for themselves or share with a fellow test subject.

Despite the fact that the hungry subjects had just confirmed the importance of helping others, which is indeed characteristic of the welfare state, the researchers found they were no more inclined to share their loot with others when given the chance.

Dr Aarøe told The Times: ‘There is increasing evidence that when we endorse a particular policy or moral principles, we do so in order to benefit ourselves.’