Many have gotten all worked up about this, mainly liberals thinking they are superior to conservatives (implied in the LA Times article):
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.
The Times could have just as easily talked to a conservative neuroscientist who would have dismissed the study as only an indication of skill on a specific test.
Or they could have talked to Jonah Goldberg, an editor at the National Review, who dismisses the whole study as "just a continuation of a long line of craptacular research." He goes on:
Or instead, maybe the hurly-burly of college life — or simply the age and ignorance of the college students — makes these distinctions more pronounced as students are long on glandular passion and shorter on introspection.
Or perhaps, self-described conservatives are for neurological — or entirely ideological — reasons less eager to impress a bunch of guys in a lab coat. A recent — and, to be fair, very modest study — suggested that liberals care more about status while conservatives care more about money. So maybe, the young liberals saw an advantage that was lost on the conservatives, and thus the liberals tried harder. Perhaps the liberal kids thought that they could get a gold star from the man in the white coat — and if they tried hard enough, maybe even an internship! Meanwhile, the conservative might have said to himself, “this is craptacular” and lost interest. One way of producing more accurate results might be to re-run the test with the addition of cash incentives and see what happens.
This is one of those situations when one should say nothing and appear ignorant, rather than opening one's mouth and confirming it.
If you want to really understand what was being tested in the study, and what the results reveal, ask neuroscientists, not newspaper writers.
From Mind Hacks:
The fact that there is a brain difference between people with left-wing and right-wing views is hardly news. Because every view we have is supported by the brain, by definition they'll be a difference somewhere - just as there's a brain difference between people who prefer London to Paris, strawberry to vanilla, or Britney to Christina.
What is interesting about this new study, is that the researchers have found a difference in the ability to inhibit habitual responses in a 'detect a letter' task which was linked to brain activity in the anterior cingulate cortex or ACC - a deep mid-line area in the frontal lobes.Activity in this area correlates with 'conflict monitoring' - the ability to detect a conflict between completing mental demands.
It forms part of the brain's cognitive control and self-regulation system and when it is triggered, the ACC calls in reinforcements to focus attention - in the form of the upper surface areas of the frontal lobes.
Some cases of people with damage to the ACC seem to have perfectly fine conflict monitoring, so it's not certain that it's a clear link, but the evidence increasingly points that way.
So the study found that conservatives showed less ACC activation and were more likely to respond when they weren't supposed to - in other words, were more habitual in their responding.
The study is further explained over at Cognitive Daily:
Let's take a look at what the researchers, led by David Amodio, actually did find. Participants first took a survey in which one of the questions asked them to rate their political orientation on a scale ranging from "extremely liberal" to "extremely conservative."
Next they were attached to an electroencephalogram while they completed a quick go/no go task. The task is mind-numbingly simple, but it can be extremely difficult in practice.
(you can take a similar test on your own at their site -- requires Quicktime)The W is shown 80 percent of the time, and the M is shown the rest of the time. After a while, it becomes quite difficult to resist tapping when you see the M. The researchers found a difference in accuracy between the viewers who said they were liberal and those who said they were conservative. Liberalism correlated significantly (r = .30) with accuracy on the task. (Yes, the researchers controlled for the letters in the study -- liberals aren't only better at resisting when the letter is "W".)
They also found a difference in brain activity in two parts of the brain (actually this was measured in electromagnetic potential at the surface of the head, and the researchers extrapolated to find the location of the activity). Political orientation was correlated significantly with the strength of brain activity during the key no-go portion of the task (r = .41). The researchers calculated that the increased activity was occurring in the anterior cingulate cortex, responsible for conflict monitoring.
In other words, liberals are more likely than conservatives to have a strong response in the area of the brain used to inhibit responses at the time when they are supposed to inhibit response.
___The study results are actually quite modest -- the researchers claim to be the first to find a relationship between political differences and "a basic neuro-cognitive mechanism for self-regulation." However, these results are supported by a wide range of behavioral data which does support the idea that conservatives are less willing to accept complex arguments or shades of meaning compared to liberals.
Does this mean that liberals are "hard wired" to be different from conservatives? This data alone certainly doesn't support that claim. After all, the go/no go task is a learned activity. The reason that it's hard to inhibit tapping when the "M" appears is that you've learned to tap when you see a letter. You could also learn to tap only when you see an M, and you might be able to learn to be better at this task. Could you learn to be liberal (or conservative)? This study doesn't answer that question, but my suspicion is you could. After all, what's considered liberal in the U.S. is considered conservative in many places. In other places, a U.S. conservative would be considered a flaming liberal.
So there you have a little less knee-jerk reaction and a bit more explanation of what the study actually was looking at, how it worked, and what the results might mean.
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