Researchers show that liberals and conservatives approach everyday decisions differently.

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-politics10sep10,0,5982337.story

by amichail • 19 years ago

14 12 19 years ago

aswanson• 19 years ago

I could not resist, even though I know I should. This is one conservative who changed his mind. http://youtube.com/watch?v=YENbElb5-xY&feature=bz100

gwenhwyfaer5• 19 years ago

What about libertarians (of either pole)?

rkts• 19 years ago

Please tell me I'm not the only one who recoils at the inference from

"Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W"

"Based on the results, he said, liberals could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas."

As the article notes, political orientation is correlated with a lot of things: income, education, religion, race/ethnicity, etc. Even if they tried to control for any possible confounding variables (the article doesn't mention whether they did), I'm very skeptical that they've successfully isolated a causal relationship between liberalism/conservatism and some innate brain capacity that makes you good at pressing a button at the right time.

gwenhwyfaer5• 19 years ago

Of course they haven't. However, considering the letter they chose, I wonder if the whole thing is a put-on...

gwenhwyfaer5• 19 years ago

[notices that every other comment attached to this link just got -1'd]

And here I was hoping that drive-by downmodding was confined to reddit.

If you don't like the story, fine. But don't take it out on the people who... as it happens, also thought the story was worthless, but found that worthlessness worth mentioning.

andreyf• 19 years ago

One of my professors had an interesting comment:

Somewhat unfortunately slanted article, I'm afraid. It makes it sound like conservatives are broken. In fact, one could just as easily have constructed the task so that the extra deliberation made by liberals caused them to perform worse (by changing how errors and time are used in the final score).

I think the argument has got to be that there are multiple strategies for dealing with uncertainty in the world and the correct one depends on the world as much as anything else. I believe that we are in a world that favors Kerry's style of decision making over Bush's. But, that's a claim about the world, not a value judgment about Kerry, per se.

Goladus• 19 years ago

The fact that the sample group was composed entirely of college students means that extrapolating "Kerry-style" vs. "Bush-style" doesn't even rate as "tenuous." Politics on a college campus tend to be a lot different from everywhere else.

Researchers show that liberals and conservatives approach everyday decisions differently.

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