Brian Dare (

brian_dare) wrote,
@ 2008-03-04 11:29:00

Current mood:	Wicked
Current music:	Idiots Are Taking Over - NOFX

Liberals are smarter than Conservatives
Although, listening to 970WFLA lately, I'm sick of both sides!

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-politics10sep10,0,5982337.story

Participants were college students whose politics ranged from "very liberal" to "very conservative." They were instructed to tap a keyboard when an M appeared on a computer monitor and to refrain from tapping when they saw a W.

M appeared four times more frequently than W, conditioning participants to press a key in knee-jerk fashion whenever they saw a letter.

Each participant was wired to an electroencephalograph that recorded activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that detects conflicts between a habitual tendency (pressing a key) and a more appropriate response (not pressing the key). Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W, researchers said. Liberals and conservatives were equally accurate in recognizing M.

From the Los Angeles Times

Study finds left-wing brain, right-wing brain

Even in humdrum nonpolitical decisions, liberals and conservatives literally think differently, researchers show.
By Denise Gellene
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

September 10, 2007

Exploring the neurobiology of politics, scientists have found that liberals tolerate ambiguity and conflict better than conservatives because of how their brains work.

In a simple experiment reported todayin 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.

Previous psychological studies have found that conservatives tend to be more structured and persistent in their judgments whereas liberals are more open to new experiences. The latest study found those traits are not confined to political situations but also influence everyday decisions.

The results show "there are two cognitive styles -- a liberal style and a conservative style," said UCLA neurologist Dr. Marco Iacoboni, who was not connected to the latest research.

Participants were college students whose politics ranged from "very liberal" to "very conservative." They were instructed to tap a keyboard when an M appeared on a computer monitor and to refrain from tapping when they saw a W.

M appeared four times more frequently than W, conditioning participants to press a key in knee-jerk fashion whenever they saw a letter.

Each participant was wired to an electroencephalograph that recorded activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that detects conflicts between a habitual tendency (pressing a key) and a more appropriate response (not pressing the key). Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W, researchers said. Liberals and conservatives were equally accurate in recognizing M.

Researchers got the same results when they repeated the experiment in reverse, asking another set of participants to tap when a W appeared.

Frank J. Sulloway, a researcher at UC Berkeley's Institute of Personality and Social Research who was not connected to the study, said the results "provided an elegant demonstration that individual differences on a conservative-liberal dimension are strongly related to brain activity."

Analyzing the data, Sulloway said liberals were 4.9 times as likely as conservatives to show activity in the brain circuits that deal with conflicts, and 2.2 times as likely to score in the top half of the distribution for accuracy.

Sulloway said the results could explain why President Bush demonstrated a single-minded commitment to the Iraq war and why some people perceived Sen. John F. Kerry, the liberal Massachusetts Democrat who opposed Bush in the 2004 presidential race, as a "flip-flopper" for changing his mind about the conflict.

Based on the results, he said, liberals could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas.

"There is ample data from the history of science showing that social and political liberals indeed do tend to support major revolutions in science," said Sulloway, who has written about the history of science and has studied behavioral differences between conservatives and liberals.

Lead author David Amodio, an assistant professor of psychology at New York University, cautioned that the study looked at a narrow range of human behavior and that it would be a mistake to conclude that one political orientation was better. The tendency of conservatives to block distracting information could be a good thing depending on the situation, he said.

Political orientation, he noted, occurs along a spectrum, and positions on specific issues, such as taxes, are influenced by many factors, including education and wealth. Some liberals oppose higher taxes and some conservatives favor abortion rights.

Still, he acknowledged that a meeting of the minds between conservatives and liberals looked difficult given the study results.

"Does this mean liberals and conservatives are never going to agree?" Amodio asked. "Maybe it suggests one reason why they tend not to get along."

--

denise.gellene@latimes.com

http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2008/02/liberal-mind-vs-conservative-mind-is-it.html

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radi0radi0
2008-03-04 06:44 pm UTC (link)

This reeks of junk science. The only logical way I can suppose studies like these even exist is that a guy with a degree but no work and little imagination tells a university, "Hey! I've got an idea!" and the school never bothers to ask "What is it?" and hands him money to play scientist.

Personally I'm a bit outraged that other political groups were not evaluated. Why were yours, anarchist, and mine, libertarian, not included? Maybe it's because it is well known we think for ourselves and therefore are far smarter than those tested. Just a guess.

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brian_dare
2008-03-04 07:22 pm UTC (link)

I'm actually a little surprised at your reaction. I would have thought as a libertarian you would have some sense of already being outside the "normal" dichotomy of "conservative" and "liberal."

For a long time, I basically labeled myself "conservative" in the sense of less government interference. But the meaning of that word, or at least my understanding of it's actual use, have changed within my lifetime.

As an anarchist, albeit a hypothetical anarchist, I believe in no government, but instead believe in the need for each individual to become socially conscious enough to "self-govern," where we can work out our differences without need for recourse to an external body.

Of course, we don't live in that world, not yet, and possibly not ever. It's a dream I have that might be nothing more than dream.

Philosophically, however, I see anarchist as transcending the limitations of choosing one extreme over the other. I'm conservative on some issues and liberal on others. I choose my options on a case-by-case basis, not a platform.

In many ways, in actual practice, I am a libertarian, in the sense that libertarian has replaced the concept of what I, earlier in life, would have referred to as "conservative": less government interfering with my personal rights.

But there is a great deal of "liberal" in libertarian thinking, not in the sense of government-mandated social reforms, but in tolerance of social distinctions of race, class, religion, sexual orientation and more. I have found most libertarians to be fairly tolerant.

So, in a sense, libertarianism suffers from the same problem as my idealized anarchy: both seek to exist in a world where individuals tolerate each other, without need of government to enforce that tolerance, which begs the question - is that possible?

Until such a time as we are each more enlightened, would for example same-sex marriage be accepted by the masses without passing a law deeming it acceptable? Clearly the better, and more "libertarian" answer would be that government should not be involved in decisions of marriage at all, it is a social contract. But without the law's support, until the consensus of thought has changed, people would be left at the mercy of employers and benefits providers to accept or reject their status as "married."

As far as "junk science," I was struck with the simplicity of the experiment. What you have to remember is the test was not to determine whether the participants were actually "conservative" or "liberal," only how they viewed themselves and how it related to measurable motor and brain performance.

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radi0radi0
2008-03-05 05:14 pm UTC (link)

I'm going to be all over the road on this response, so I'll try to break up the thoughts in separate paragraphs.

My original response was based entirely on what I saw as bad science experiment, taking politics out of it. I saw someone saying group A is smarter than group B because of some arbitrary reasoning which is badly flawed on multiple levels. That fact it was liberals vs conservatives was meaningless really. (info you don't need, but the reason I saw it that was is because I produced a show for a few years where we had a running gag about getting "Study Money" by doing a mindless experiment. My favorite was a 50-year study about guys with beards vs those without. 50 YEARS people got paid to research that)

I do consider myself well outside the dichotomy as a libertarian. Traditionally, when people speak of conservative/liberal they mean a left-leaning or right-leaning way of thinking on all subjects. But that requires the graph measuring it to be a straight line. I don't exist on that graph. The best I have seen is a graph with both a vertical, measuring economic issues, and horizontal, measuring social issues. A quick, very basic one is here: http://www.theadvocates.org/quiz.html which shows what I'm writing of. I don't believe people are left on some issues and right on other, as you said you are. People have a standard for all their reasoning, but it doesn't fit on the straight line--but it does on a vertical/horizontal graph. Using myself as an example, I believe in freedom, both personal and economic. On the straight line political ticker that makes me conservative on some issue, liberal on others, but I'm NEITHER cons. or liberal--but I can be classified as libertarian on all issues.

In the past 10 years what the terms "conservative" and "liberal" actually represent have changes greatly. Today's "liberal" is what used to be socialist, or Statist, meant to most people. Conservativism is currently a lost meaning because of the current GOP in Congress and Bush. In 1994, Newt Gingrich and the GOP took over congress under the banner of "Conservativism". Then in 2000 Bush ran calling himself a compassionate conservative. After getting into office, they did not live up to what many Republicans consider conservative positions, yet they continued to call themselves conservatives and being they are the ones in power they do set the standard for that label. You listen to 970 so you understand the outrage many traditional conservatives have with them.

I currently love listening to talk radio, hearing Rush, Hannity and others explode over McCain getting the nomination. McCain is no where near what they wanted and they know they've lost their party, it is sliding away from the positions they hold dear. It may be because I'm a libertarian and happy to see either major party crumble, or maybe I'm more of a sadist than I realize. My favorite schadenfreude moment came when Rush mocked Ron Paul, then two minutes later lamented that there was no true Reagan conservative running for president. Ron Paul WAS the most Reagan-like candidate, on the issues, and they spat on him out like a leper.

I'm about to run out of room, so I'll stop now while I'm still behind.

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