You can say I lost my faith in Science and Progress.

So, most Libs are smarter than your typical Conservatard? No surprise there.

That Explains everything................their brain dead....well halfway atleast....maybe alittle more than half.....haaaaaaaaaaa......those who still stand with the Preznit are either plain old stupid...or they have a burning hatred for the Democratic party...take your pick........to me their stupid hatin mofo's..

Puhleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeze! This 'new study' is not 'new' nor does it tell it like it is. For that you need to read The Authoritarians free and online, written by Bob Altemeyer. Who is that Homer Simpson wants to know. Well.....

Bob is a Canadian researcher whose work John Dean, of Watergate fame, relied on quite heavily in his, Dean's, book 'Conservatives Without Conscience'. So clik on over and check it out.

It's worse than you think it is. No...

Really.

Luckily Republicans know the difference between Good and Evil, and everything must be one or the other and if you are not on the side of Good then you are automatically on the side of Evil forever and ever and ever. Amen!

Science is a myth though its all hocus pocus, just trust jesus

I kid I kid

Blue Buddha @ 9:

Swashbuckler @ 3:

In MBTI terms, cons tend to be S's, particularly SJ's.

I was going to say the same. In my experience with friends and family, it is almost always the case that liberals are Ns and conservatives are S's.

jtmonty46 @ 5:

The article also uses the phrase "knee-jerk" when describing the way the more conservative participants reacted during the study. I have, however, met my share of "knee-jerk" liberals.

...and as for the "knee-jerk" part, I tend to find those to be F's rather than T's, since they go by personal feelings rather than analysis. This is particularly true for FP's.

Quite a few MBTI sites categorize Bush as ISFJ... not that surprising I guess.

I - Introverted: Terrible speaker and awkward in social situations.
S - Sensing: Everything needs to be in clear, rigid black & white terms (see my posts above)
F - Feeling: Makes decisions on personal feeling rather than analysis.

I meet so many people who CLAIM to be liberal and they are just as, if not more, knee-jerk than those who claim to be conservative. By that observation, I determine that they are really conservative. For example, consider someone who is vehemently on the side of free speech. Most would assume that that means they are liberal because they tolerate points of view with which they disagree. However, wouldn't they be considered conservative because they don't tolerate ambiguity when it comes to such an issue (i.e. free speech sometimes but not all the time)? When someone says "I'm a liberal because I believe fully in the separation of church and state" that is a form of conservatism because they wouldn't tolerate a view that says "sometimes it's okay to include religious beliefs when making government policy," which would be, by the definition established in the experiment, liberal.

A.Citizen:
"Bob is a Canadian researcher whose work John Dean, of Watergate fame, relied on quite heavily in his, Dean’s, book ‘Conservatives Without Conscience’. So clik on over and check it out."

--I'd add check out Robert D. Hare's book 'Without Conscience' as well...
http://hare.org/
Hare's work on psychopathology is illuminating. And not new at all.
(In Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s last book, 'A Man Without A Country', he devoted a whole to what he called 'PP's; Pyschopathic Personalities. I believe it was Hare-inspired.
I also believe he did so not out of pettiness, but believing it explained a lot,
that it explained to some large degree why he ended up without a country...)

Very elegant study.

I wonder if there is a developmental component. I remember clearly when I stopped believing in the conservative mystique. I don't know if anyone else had this experiment, but as a twelve year-old, I perceived that conservatives (republicans) supported traditional values, the church, the military, and America (valued over other countries). At twelve, this seemed like the only sensible way to prioritize. Around sixteen, I started thinking all of that was bullshit, and the values of free-thinking, freedom of expression, and cultural awareness gained primacy - and progressive political thinking followed.

I'm often curious if some of the young republicans I see might be more influenced by a perception of their cultural identity when determining their political leanings, rather than actual analysis of the issues.

Conformation of a long held view that the difference between Conservatives and Liberals, the former has Lizard brains, the latter Homo Sapien.

"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."

So, does this mean we can remove Repugs from office because of bad DNA?

Awesome!

jtmonty46 @ 22:

Radically Moderate @ 19:

Yes and nuance,details, and complexities are what seems to frustrate most Americans about their elected officials.

Arrrgggghhhh! Nuance.details, complexity... Bad!

Fire, smoke...obfuscation...Good!

Did you get the point?
Remember that the poll numbers for Congress are no better than Bushs' numbers.

Old Billy @ 24:

Rufus T. Firefly @ 18:

I meet so many people who CLAIM to be liberal and they are just as, if not more, knee-jerk than those who claim to be conservative. By that observation, I determine that they are really conservative. For example, consider someone who is vehemently on the side of free speech. Most would assume that that means they are liberal because they tolerate points of view with which they disagree. However, wouldn't they be considered conservative because they don't tolerate ambiguity when it comes to such an issue (i.e. free speech sometimes but not all the time)? When someone says "I'm a liberal because I believe fully in the separation of church and state" that is a form of conservatism because they wouldn't tolerate a view that says "sometimes it's okay to include religious beliefs when making government policy," which would be, by the definition established in the experiment, liberal.

But not all decisions are made rapidly. Just going back to a core principle doesn't make one conservative. I'm not sure the experiment suggests that conservatives make decisions quicker, rather the experiment provides support for the hypothesis that conservatives are quicker to anticipate that things will be predictable.

I think in your example, a liberal would make a nuanced argument regarding the establishment clause; whereas, a conservative would attempt to force an outcome based on a predictable pattern (i.e. liberal would think that people who hold religious beliefs should participate in government, but policy should be compatible with the constitution - conservative would think religious people are being excluded from the political process.)

I understood the article to indicate that the "knee-jerk" response (perhaps a poorly chosen phrase) indicated that the perception, by the more conservative subject, that the "W" was an "M", was because they took less time to analyze the displayed letter. The same held true when the letters where switched in sequence of presentation. Although the article did not specify, it was most likely the fact that an M and W are the same when inverted. I wonder if they tried the experiment using other letters?

Conservatism is fear. We already knew this.

Right wing brains = Nose pickers, Snot eaters. Disgusting, but true.

Please no more MBTI references, it seems quite rigid to classify personalities based on the degree to which someone expresses 4 dichotomies.

All 7 billion people in the world can be represented by 16 different categories of personality. Seems a tad contrived.

That being said, this study doesn't seem to mean much either. So people who have a habit of thinking rigidly continue to think rigidly. People who think more critically continue to think critically.

craig @ 32:

Conservatism is fear. We already knew this.

I remember my parents being life-long Democrats. Roosevelt, Truman, Stevenson, Kennedy, Johnson and then...NIXON. God-damn Nixon! Believe me, I've had many conversations with them over the years as to what happened and all I can get out of them is the horse-shit Reagan Era "agree to disagree" crap. These are the same people who, when I was eight, saw John Kennedy as a new beginning for America. The was Hope.

He was assassinated and then there was the down-hill spiral of Vietnam and the prospect of more of the same with Humphrey. The only thing I can think of is that my parents bought into the right-wing "government is broken" crap and you should be afraid of thinking about the grey areas of life. Every problem had to have a simplistic yes or no answer.

I still believe in Hope. The answers to the questions in life are not easy to come by, and some people don't like those answers. It's called life.

The question is simple, left wing - defective person. Right wing - realist

Weekend with family STOP Eyes gouged out STOP can't talk now STOP Soylent Green is Republi-

"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."

Wait, isn't this in the definitions of 'liberal' and 'conservative'? As I always understood it, at our respective cores: liberals wanted change and conservatives wanted things to remain the same. Forget the loaded and often subtly changing political definitions of who these two groups are, this is still essentially the case.

Therefore, it is not exceptional or surprising that cons are 'structured and persistent' whereas libs are 'open to new experiences'.

That's just who we are.

Explainer @ 43:

We've had this problem since day one in this country.
The split isn't lerft/right, it's forward/backward. Progress or regress.
The conservatives just want to conserve, clench onto, that safe old time, when daddy was there.
Progress is what has always moved this country forward and brought us all of our gains.
Actually the problem goes all the way back, but you know what I mean.

Ask you conservative friends to list the accomplishments of the right...better yet, don't.
I did and all they had was welfare reform. Welfare reform? That's it?

Sheesh...we've fought and won a revolution, abolished slavery, got the vote to women, created the weekend and the 40 hour work week, abolished child labor and fought for peace and civil rights.

Welfare reform...really?

Haha - welfare reform was Clinton's acheivment anyway. If they had tried welfare reform under Bush, they would have (1) found some ridiculous way to privatize it (2) no one would want it and (3) they would have thrown poor folks over the wayside just to demonstrate how quickly they were getting people off the government teet.

Liberals are easily better at government simply because it's such a progressive concept. Perhaps it would be more liberal to allow anarchy, but then, wouldn't the conservatives eventually end up controlling everything?

CBD is real and causing untold damage to American lives every day.

Conservative Brain Disorder strikes unseen, without warning and affects mainly the weak and the sedate. It causes perfectly normal people to abandon reality and adopt strange war fantasies.

Help bring this aggressive, flatulent and stupefying scourge under control by giving your hard earned liberal dollars to any recognized progressive candidate.

Only through your generous donations will we be able to combat such symptoms as:

- sitting alone in one's car within a hijacked Wi-fi zone writing violent and factually bankrupt comments on the Free Republic website.
- Self-mutilation of the inner ear by listening to hours of Rush, Hannity, and Hewett.
- post-traumatic stress disorder over the cancellation of the Half Hour Comedy Hour.
- delusions of grandeur based on the war-time fantasies of George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

Remember, give 'til hurts because...

A conservative mind is a terrible thing to ... have.

The overall assessment being; liberals are survivors in spite of the world's travails, tribulations, and tragedies while conservatives are not. --- Does this mean that ultra conservatives are doomed to become extinct so the rest of us can evolve? --- (YEEEEEEEEEEPEEEEEEEE!!!!) --- I mean ... that's terrible news...

I have conservative friends I can't even talk to anymore. I can't even be in the same room with them. If I had to - for someone else - I can do it - but one in particular is difficult to be around. Her attitude, demeanor, etc., on almost any topic grates on me now that I understand where she's coming from. And of course - her opinions are all presented as if they were fact - and of course she's always right - and she always has some convoluted crack-pot logic that she's twisted like a pretzel to back up her comments.

If I wanted to deal with that kind of crap - I could listen to ANY news program on any TV station.
*

Andotech @ 15:

No surprise there at all. Have you ever tried to reason with a republican? Good luck!

This is also my experience - they are always right - there's no talking to them.
*

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.

This seems to indicate we need a Constitutional Amendment. It seems a conservative's vote should only count one-half as much as a liberal's vote.

The description fits quite well.

Conservatives are afraid and fearful, more willing to believe a simple lie then the, possibly world-shattering, truth. Everything must be black&white, us good, them bad.

Is it a surprise that fundamentalist/racist groups are mostly conservative?
Don't confuse communism with liberalism. The communist ideal was, similar to all other forms of state, whored to further a different goal.
Mao, f.i. was not liberal because his 'reforms' were basically a leap forward in the wrong direction.

Look around the world, present and past, and classify known individuals into conservative and liberal.
For many, it is easy. Some it is quite difficult.

F.i. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ghandi might seem conservative in their manor, but for their time, were as liberal as you could get.
If you stood up for minority rights, you were a liberal back in those days.

They were against the system when being against the system could (and did in MLKs case did) cost you your life.

neo-con-nutbag: There are NO grey areas. Why do you liberals hate America?

GHWB gives all left-handed, right-brained people a bad name.
He gave his eldest son the worst one though. Their demonic legacies will forever be synonymous.

Does this mean I was born liberal, It's not a choice? And that I will always be this way!

No, not much is predetermined. The structural activation model of developmental psychology (which replaced the nature vs. nurture bullshit) indicates that like any complex system nothing is black and white. It is a series of overlapping bell curves of who might be susceptible to a result and if you have been activated by your environment. Remember that IQ can be altered up to 40% (vague memory from class) by how you are raised. I am sure that the ability to think in a flexible manner is equally trainable. In fact you could argue that Taoist philosophy or its child Zen is simply a training system for this type of thinking. The ability to understand quantum vs. Newtonian physics and how they are both true and contradictory would be an extreme example from science. A Zen koan e.g. if a tree falls in the wood, is a practice to make your mind capable of understanding paradox. It’s funny that Einstein couldn't believe that god "played dice."

[...] Nature Neuroscience [subscribers only – sorry] paper that’s been written up and linked around: “Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and [...]

Psychological studies are not neurological facts. Bad science makes for bad conclusions.

This is of course why the framers of the Constitution were so foresightful in designing our government as adversarial. Work with nature, not against it. Through this bitter competition between two primary approaches to thinking government moves very slowly, if at all, enabling most of the thousands of decisions (minus the occasional high profile ones that we actually hear about on the news) enacted by lawmakers to be pretty watered down and not really changing our lives at all. Pretty amazing that a roomful of sweaty, perfumed wig-wearers intuitively understood this much without a scientific study to craft a system that mostly works.

oops, I saw a newer post that explained it. Nevermind.

But the president has no brain, does the study address that condition?

oh well - so conservatives resist change and tend to be dogmatic while liberals embrace change and tend to be dogmatic.

I could have come to that conclusion for about half what those science guys charged. LOL

A more appropriate comparison would be Confuscianists (people who believe in strict rules and interpretations) and Taoists (people who believe that nothing is absolute). Because really, there are open-minded conservatives (though they don't get much mic time anymore) and dogmatic pseudo-liberals (you can't be close-minded and be that authentic a liberal).

The comments of researcher Frank J. Sulloway quoted in the article indicate liberal bias. And the paper's decision to include them in the article might indicate liberal bias. (Okay, it does.) But the study's findings are what they are--and they clearly reveal a significant difference in the collective cognitive capability of the liberal subjects and the conservative subjects. And it doesn't look good for the conservatives.

Thanks to Steve Benen for posting.

To #82, "Liberal Smasher":

Conclusive proof that Bush voters are not smarter than Kerry voters: They voted for Bush.

As for Bush having a higher GPA than Kerry , both graduated from Yale with GPA's in the "C" range--between 70-79. Kerry's was 76. Even if it was a whopping 79, Bush's GPA could hardly be described as "higher."