So there's science behind John Kerry's flip-flopping and George W. Bush single-mindedness.
In a simple experiment reported today in the journal Nature Neuroscience, scientists at New York University and UCLA show that political orientation is related to differences in how the brain processes information.
Read the study, and see if your: brain; image of yourself; and results on our political views survey coninside.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-politics10sep10,1,7735909.story?coll=la-headlines-nation
4 comments:
Well, it's difficult to judge the experiment without actually seeing lab data; phrases like "more likely" and "fewer mistakes" are pretty vague and could indicate a difference of one percent or fifty. So I hesitate even to say that the experiment really supports a difference in the brains of liberals and conservatives. But what Sreeharsha writes seems to actually support the experiment - it just depends on how you compare the ends of the spectrum and what words you use. Where Sreeharsha says "hard headed" - meaning, I assume, adamant (as opposed to mulish) - other people might say "narrow-minded"; where he seems to hint at "wishy-washy" (he didn't say that, of course, but I inferred from his defense at the end that he thought people would interpret it that way), others might suggest "open to change". If conservatives do block distractions, as the psychology prof says, and this relates to their determination, the experiment proves this: conservatives seemed to rely on the fact that an M would show up more often than a W, even when it didn't. As Mr. Doherty would say, it's not better or worse - just different.
Although the experiment seems to playfully explain the differences between what we deem conservative and liberal, I find that the article (and the experiment) proves nothing really. Even though the analysis of the date shows that liberals are 4.9 more likely to show brain activity than conservatives, the numbers do not seemed to be controlled in anyway. The generalization and the likelihood that liberals have more "brain activity" is hard to judge without seeing the raw data (as Vivi said). Who knows. There might have been one candidate that is extremely liberal in comparison to the rest of the participants and that could have skewed the results.
"Based on the results, he said, liberals could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas." I think that anyone who understands the term liberal will have known this already.
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