Study: Conservatives are statistically more prone than liberals to jump to (erroneous) conclusions

What I found interesting about this Los Angeles Times report was the implication that conservatives, because of their brain "wiring," appear to be more likely than liberals, not just to jump to conclusions, but also to jump to erroneous conclusions.

Who knows: Given that a corollary of the First Commandment is to face the facts as best we can, this might have implications for the way we think about The Current Disputes in the Episcopal Church.

Excerpt (emphasis mine):

Exploring the neurobiology of politics, scientists have found that liberals tolerate ambiguity and conflict better than conservatives because of how their brains work.

In a simple experiment reported today in the journal Nature Neuroscience, scientists at New York University and UCLA show that political orientation is related to differences in how the brain processes information.

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. * * *

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 [between thinking and habit], and 2.2 times as likely to score in the top half of the distribution for accuracy. * * *

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.

Denise Gellene, Study finds left-wing brain, right-wing brain, Los Angeles Times, Sept. 10, 2007 (emphasis added).

In the proper circumstances, of course, jumping to conclusions can be a very useful thing. There are situations where you don't have time to think through what you're going to do. According to the LA Times article, the study's lead author, NYU assistant professor David Amodio, acknowledged this; "[t]he tendency of conservatives to block distracting information could be a good thing depending on the situation, [Amodio] said."

Still, when it comes to policy decisions that have long-term effects on people's lives, you do sort of hope that the deciders think things through instead of just engaging in knee-jerk reactions.

Comments

[Mikel]

Wow that's interesting...I'm not surprised about the bit about liberals being more open to new ideas. This is one of the main things I think of as a liberal tenancy--Open mindedness.

[Craig Goodrich]

If this proves that conservatives are more likely to jump to conclusions than liberals, does it mean that the experimenters were conservatives, since there is no conceivable way that the experiment could support the conclusions they draw from it, or does it instead prove that The LA Times is eager to pat its fellow liberals on the anterior cingulate cortex?

Or perhaps it merely proves that it was a slow month at Neuroscience...

[David H.]

A commenter on another blog I read has pointed out, quite correctly, that what this study shows is a correlation between being conservative and jumping to (erroneous) conclusions. And as any undergrad psychology student can tell you, after having it pounded into their heads - "correlation does not imply causation."

And so, with tongue planted firmly in cheek, may I offer some add'l hypotheses to check:

1. The brain malfunction which results in jumping to (erroneous) conclusions causes conservatism (i.e. brain damage results in conservatism)

2. The habits of conservative thought lead to brain malfunction which results in jumping to (erroneous) conclusions (i.e. being conservative causes brain damage)

There, that should about cover it... ;)