Beyond Rivalry

This is gonna provide fodder for water-cooler conversation ...

The Chicago Tribune ran a story today titled "Political attitudes may be all in head." New York University professor and psychologist David Amodio and others found that a part of the brain's cortex is more flexible in self-described liberals than in self-declared conservatives: "The brain region in question helps people shift gears when their usual response would be inappropriate, supporting the notion that liberals are more flexible in their thinking."

This study apparently grew from other hot-button studies of recent decades, which were reviewed in 2003 and found to show that "conservatives tend to be more rigid and closed-minded, less tolerant of ambiguity and less open to new experiences," not to mention being more fearful, more aggressive, intolerant of inequality, and lacking complexity of thought.

(An author involved in the review of the literature and in the current study 'defended' the conclusions of the research by saying that "'liberals could be characterized on the basis of our overall profile as relatively disorganized, indecisive and perhaps overly drawn to ambiguity.'" That defense seems like the opposite of damning with faint praise; to my ears, he's praising with faint ... damnation? Liberals are all Buddhist masters, content to live in the place of paradox and not-knowing? Or they're all Myers-Briggs Ps while conservatives are all Js?)

Linda Skitka, professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, suggests that perhaps the study population was skewed towards extreme conservatives: "'We're not a very liberal country,' she said. 'We're more likely to find extreme conservatives in the U.S. than extreme liberals. ... Extreme conservatives could be really rigid. ... Moderates should be pretty flexible. But if we go all the way to the left, they may look a lot like the extreme right -- rigid in their ideas.'"

That seems reasonable, i.e., it correlates with my observation :-) that idealogues and people who hold extreme views tend to resemble each other more than they differ from each other.

Also seems reasonable that there are more likely to be extreme (radicalised) conservatives at UCLA and NYU than at many other places, people who move to the extremes in reaction to the prevailing ethos, which is undoubtedly liberal at both schools.

Finally, how can such sweeping conclusions (e.g, Amodio's, that left-leaning people are "more sensitive to the need for change and more sensitive to the need to change their behavior") be reached about a study that included only 43 college-age participants, and participants whose self-labelling, when not reactionary to their college culture, probably reflects more about their adoption of or reaction to their parents' leanings than their own (as some article commenters have noted).

Seems like a dubiously useful study on its own, but sure to deepen the illusion of a right-left divide. And, as Scott Adams asks, why are we stunned by "the suggestion that the brain is involved in thinking[?] What were the other hypotheses?"