Posted on 09/14/2007 1:29:14 PM PDT by neverdem
Are liberals smarter than conservatives?
It looks that way, according to a study published this week in Nature Neuroscience. In a rapid response test—you press a button if you're given one signal, but not if you're given a different signal—the authors found that conservatives were "more likely to make errors of commission," whereas "stronger liberalism was correlated with greater accuracy." They concluded that "a more conservative orientation is related to greater persistence in a habitual response pattern, despite signals that this response pattern should change."
Does this mean liberal brains are fitter? Apparently. "Liberals are more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty," the authors wrote. New York University, which helped fund the study, concluded, "Liberals are more likely than are conservatives to respond to cues signaling the need to change habitual responses." The study's lead author, NYU professor David Amodio, told London's Daily Telegraph that "liberals tended to be more sensitive and responsive to information that might conflict with their habitual way of thinking."
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
DING, DING, DING!!!!!! We have a winner!
Actually, they're telling US to drive hybrids while they do as they please.
The whole basis for prejudice, bias and ignorance are these pseudo-scientific generalizations to justify them.
Of course “liberals” are so much smarter than everybody else — and why they should do the thinking for everybody else and tell everybody else what to do. That is their “divine right” as kings or God wouldn’t have created them smarter than everybody else — and made them entitled to more money, power and status than everybody else.
And they’re so democratic too.
Any study done among college students isn't likely to accurately explain adult behaviors. Also, I don't know if they adequately account for the demographics: if more college women consider themselves liberal and more college men are conservatives, that in itself is going to skew the results.
Considering that the technique was ERP, they probably couldn't find more than seven from the PoliSci Dept willing to be wired up in the Psych Lab.
“There is terror in numbers,” writes Darrell Huff in How to Lie with Statistics. And nowhere does this terror translate to blind acceptance of authority more than in the slippery world of averages, correlations, graphs, and trends. Huff sought to break through “the daze that follows the collision of statistics with the human mind” with this slim volume, first published in 1954. The book remains relevant as a wake-up call for people unaccustomed to examining the endless flow of numbers pouring from Wall Street, Madison Avenue, and everywhere else someone has an axe to grind, a point to prove, or a product to sell. “The secret language of statistics, so appealing in a fact-minded culture, is employed to sensationalize, inflate, confuse, and oversimplify,” warns Huff.
Although many of the examples used in the book are charmingly dated, the cautions are timeless. Statistics are rife with opportunities for misuse, from “gee-whiz graphs” that add nonexistent drama to trends, to “results” detached from their method and meaning, to statistics’ ultimate bugaboo—faulty cause-and-effect reasoning. Huff’s tone is tolerant and amused, but no-nonsense. Like a lecturing father, he expects you to learn something useful from the book, and start applying it every day. Never be a sucker again, he cries!
Even if you can’t find a source of demonstrable bias, allow yourself some degree of skepticism about the results as long as there is a possibility of bias somewhere. There always is.
Read How to Lie with Statistics. Whether you encounter statistics at work, at school, or in advertising, you’ll remember its simple lessons. Don’t be terrorized by numbers, Huff implores. “The fact is that, despite its mathematical base, statistics is as much an art as it is a science.” —Therese Littleton
And our vocabulary is larger than the repetitive 4 letter words that fill their posts as well
I was thinking more along the lines that liberals are knee jerk and don’t think about things. Whereas a conservative will give something due consideration before making a decision.
The liberals were the PhDs and the conservatives were the cleaning people.
We conservative men sport a larger "package" and have to shave once a day. Lib men only need to shave the fuzz about once per weak and have no evident "package" to the casual observer.
As for the women, that's easy... conservative women are hot and lib-chix sport under arm hair.
>Are liberals smarter than conservatives?<
Liberals are more devious than conservatives. Unprincipled people may call that smart. I call it dishonest.
Kinda like the 'Democratic People's Republic of Korea' (ie. Kim Jong-il's paradise on the 38th parallel).
What this tells me is that if you want a bridge built, get a conservative to do it. Oh, liberals can build a bridge, but they will get it sorta kinda maybe right.
And they get easily confused about which part of the body they shave the fuzz from.
means if your information is complex, ambiguous, and new, the liberal will believe it without question...
So I read the slate.com article - something I rarely do.
They take from whether you push the button correctly quickly or not that Liberals are smart and Conservatives are dumb -
This study is informative - it explains why liberals believe in Global warming so easily, and don’t understand a thing called the “Scientific Method.”
Got it!
Or, if the collectivists sense that the herd might be changing direction, they're quick to fall in line.
If they controlled for average lifetime video game usage they would have a different result,
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