Soccer Dad

More scientific proof that liberals make better decisions than conservatives

Two months ago Time's Sharon Begley wrote in her (political) science column that liberals have been shown scientifically to be better at making decisions than conservative.

Cheat Seeking Missiles skewered the thesis here and here. I objected here.

Well I guess I better dig out my dunce cap, because there's further proof that liberals are intellectually superior to conservatives. The LA Times reports (via memeorandum)

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.

So the previous study showed us that liberals are more likely to make informed rather than emotional decisions. This latest study shows us that liberals are more likely to assimilate new information and make proper decisions based on that new information. Or maybe it just shows us that liberals are bettter typers than conservatives.

For example 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.

Actually those of us who considered John Kerry a "flip-flopper" thought that he didn't provide an adequate reason for changing his mind.

Has anyone ever done a study of "scientists" who do these experiments to "prove" that liberals are more intellectually rigorous than conservatives?

politicized science.