[Timo]

Neuroscientists are examining whether political allegiances are hard-wired into people after finding evidence that the brains of conservatives are a different shape to those of left-wingers.

Scans of 90 students' brains at University College London (UCL) uncovered a "strong correlation" between the thickness of two particular areas of grey matter and an individual's views.

Self-proclaimed right-wingers had a more pronounced amygdala - a primitive part of the brain associated with emotion while their political opponents from the opposite end of the spectrum had thicker anterior cingulates.

Advertisement: Story continues below The research was carried out by Geraint Rees director of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience who said he was "very surprised" by the finding, which is being peer reviewed before publication next year.

It was commissioned as a light-hearted experiment by actor Colin Firth as part of his turn guest editing BBC Radio's Today program but has now developed into a serious effort to discover whether we are programmed with a particular political view.

Professor Rees said that although it was not precise enough to be able to predict someone's stance simply from a scan, there was "a strong correlation that reaches all our scientific tests of significance".

"The anterior cingulate is a part of the brain that is on the middle surface of the brain at the front and we found that the thickness of the grey matter, where the nerve cells of neurons are, was thicker the more people described themselves as liberal or left wing and thinner the more they described themselves as conservative or right wing," he told the program.

"The amygdala is a part of the brain which is very old and very ancient and thought to be very primitive and to do with the detection of emotions. The right amygdala was larger in those people who described themselves as conservative.

"It is very significant because it does suggest there is something about political attitudes that are either encoded in our brain structure through our experience or that our brain structure in some way determines or results in our political attitudes."

Mr Firth - who recently declared he had ended public support for the Liberal Democrats - said he would like to have party leader and now Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg subjected to the tests.

"I think we should have him scanned," he said.

He said the coalition made him "extremely uneasy" but would not rule out voting Lib Dem in future.

"I would have to see what identity they took on because I don't recognise them at the moment. I think all three parties are in a state of re-evaluation."

Talking about the experiment, he said: "I took this on as a fairly frivolous exercise: I just decided to find out what was biologically wrong with people who don't agree with me and see what scientists had to say about it and they actually came up with something."

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-te ... 199hk.html

[Cloud9]

Makes sense. The sophisticate worries about the motive of the burglar in his home. He worries about how society has failed the poor miscreant. He wonders about the poor burglar’s socioeconomic background and muses about how the educational system has failed him and dreams of a governmental panel convened to study burglars paid for by a government grant which everyone knows is free money.

The primitive on the other hand simply shoots the burglar and calls the cops.

[Serial_Worrier]

Makes sense. The sophisticate worries about the motive of the burglar in his home. He worries about how society has failed the poor miscreant. He wonders about the poor burglar’s socioeconomic background and muses about how the educational system has failed him and dreams of a governmental panel convened to study burglars paid for by a government grant which everyone knows is free money.

The primitive on the other hand simply shoots the burglar and calls the cops.

LOL.... Yeah I'm really sure sophisticated people wonder about the motives of a home invader while the invasion is IN PROGRESS. No fight or flight response from sophisticates during such an event!

[Hinterlander]

Political Leanings Revealed by the Eyes

http://www.livescience.com/culture/libe ... 01227.html


It may be time to take the phrase "political viewpoint" literally. A new study suggests that liberals are more likely than conservatives to follow other people's eye movements.

People normally respond to "gaze cues," or the direction that another person is looking, by glancing to see what caught that person's attention. The new study, to be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, finds that liberals respond much more strongly to such cues than conservatives. The finding is the latest in a series of clues that liberals and conservatives may be subtly different on a biological level, said study researcher Michael Dodd, a psychologist at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

"Across a variety of tasks, we are beginning to find a consistent pattern where conservatives are more responsive to threat/disgust, more responsive to angry faces, and less sensitive to gaze cues than liberals," Dodd wrote in an e-mail to LiveScience. "Liberals, on the other hand, are proving to be more responsive to positive/appetitive stimuli, more responsive to happy faces, and more sensitive to gazes."

[Hinterlander]

Wealthy Have Difficulty Detecting Emotions: Study

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/1 ... 98292.html

Rich people don't choose to be rude. They simply can't help it.

Affluent people -- in terms of income, social status and education -- have trouble detecting others' emotions, a study in Psychological Science found. While lower-class people are generally skilled at figuring out what other people are feeling, their upper-class fellows are more insensitive.

The wealthy don't need to rely on others for help, the study determined, and so their people skills have atrophied.

"They're less concerned and less perceptive of other people's needs and wishes," said study co-author Michael Kraus, according to MSNBC. "They show a deficit in empathic accuracy."


In the study, people with more education and from wealthier backgrounds had more difficulty interpreting pictures of faces. While "lower-class" people tended to correctly identify emotions, "upper-class" people had trouble.

[Serial_Worrier]

What garbage. More of the same "conservatives are mentally ill" trope.

[Hinterlander]

Liberals, Atheists Are More Highly Evolved?
Smarter people more inclined to nontraditional values, study suggests..

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... n-evolved/

[excerpts....]

Your apelike ancestors probably aren't top of mind when you enter the polling booth. But a new study suggests that human evolution may have a big influence on whether you're liberal or conservative—not to mention how smart you are, whether you believe in God, or whether you've got a cheatin' heart.

It's all linked to the evolution of intelligence, says author Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Kanazawa's theory is that intelligence—particularly our ability for on-the-spot problem solving and reasoning—arose as an adaptation to deal with the unusual and unexpected, such as a sudden forest fire.

Since disasters like that are rare in daily life, responding to them wouldn't likely be something our ancestors were hard-wired to "know" how to do. Surviving the fire required both the ability to think up a new behavior, and the willingness to try it out.

Passed down via genetics, those two traits are still the calling cards of an intelligent brain—expressed as a tendency toward adopting nontraditional social values and preferences, Kanazawa says in his new study, published in the March 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly.

As a result of their iconoclastic ancestry, he suggests, people with higher levels of intelligence are more likely to adopt social values and behaviors that are relatively new to human life—liberalism, atheism, staying up late, and (for men) monogamy, for example.

This tendency toward iconoclasm stems from smart people's brains being better adapted to dealing with new situations, according to Kanazawa.


Liberals Are Smarter Than Conservatives?

Kanazawa's evidence is in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, or Add Health, which has been tracking the same group since 1994.

The study used a picture-based vocabulary test to estimate the IQ of participating teenagers. Seven years later, the same people were asked about their religious and political beliefs.

People who later admitted to being "not at all religious," and who classified themselves as "very liberal" politically had higher IQ scores as teenagers than those who were "very religious" and "very conservative."

The difference isn't huge. Only 11 points, on average, separate the liberal from the conservative, for instance. But Kanazawa believes it's significant.

"Liberalism"—which Kanazawa defines, in part, as caring about the well-being of vast numbers of people you'll never meet—"is a very new thing for humans," he said.

"Historically, humans cared about the welfare of immediate family and friends but not complete strangers."


Faulty Evidence?

The new study is intriguing, if speculative, other psychologists say.

"Kanazawa has done interesting work, but there are other hypotheses out there for the evolution of intelligence that are equally interesting...

[see the link above for criticisms of the theory]
[personally, I'm not an atheist]

[ian807]

I think a more interesting study might be between "Political extremists" and "moderates" regardless of political affiliation.

[vision-master]

Your apelike ancestors probably aren't top of mind when you enter the polling booth. But a new study suggests that human evolution may have a big influence on whether you're liberal or conservative—not to mention how smart you are, whether you believe in God, or whether you've got a cheatin' heart.

It's all linked to the evolution of intelligence, says author Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

I'm liberal and human evolution is the biggest con game in the 20th century - NO I'm not a Bible thumper either.

[ian807]

I'm liberal and human evolution is the biggest con game in the 20th century - NO I'm not a Bible thumper either.

So....I'm guessing you haven't taken too much biology or computer science.

[mos6507]

LOL.... Yeah I'm really sure sophisticated people wonder about the motives of a home invader while the invasion is IN PROGRESS. No fight or flight response from sophisticates during such an event!

What Cloud9 is really talking about is how conservatives use cheap anti-intellectual strawmen tactics in their rhetoric to exhault the image of the noble redneck with the shotgun and common folk sense.

[mos6507]

So....I'm guessing you haven't taken too much biology or computer science.

If he did, do you think he'd still believe in Planet X?

[mos6507]

What garbage. More of the same "conservatives are mentally ill" trope.

Kinda dovetails with the story about Fox News making you dumber, though. There's a trend forming.

[tex123]

In the study, people with more education and from wealthier backgrounds had more difficulty interpreting pictures of faces. While "lower-class" people tended to correctly identify emotions, "upper-class" people had trouble.

This would tend to explain how the "lower class" or poor are better able to scam their rich counterparts into say giving money to the beggar on the street or being hooked into a shell game while some other "emotionally intuitive" soul picks the self relient person's pocket.

[vision-master]

So....I'm guessing you haven't taken too much biology or computer science.

If he did, do you think he'd still believe in Planet X?

'Global Warming' caused by Humans is a fake too.

[vision-master]

So....I'm guessing you haven't taken too much biology or computer science.

If he did, do you think he'd still believe in Planet X?

'Global Warming' caused by Humans is a fake too.

Conservatives are either dumber than a sack of rocks or they got's lot's of moola.

[ian807]

So....I'm guessing you haven't taken too much biology or computer science.

If he did, do you think he'd still believe in Planet X?

'Global Warming' caused by Humans is a fake too.

Conservatives are either dumber than a sack of rocks or they got's lot's of moola.

I doubt this. I don't doubt that there are neurological configurations that make conservatism easier for some than others. I know many highly intelligent fools. Sociopaths and people with bi-polar disorder, for example, are notorious for poor decision making regardless of intelligence. Hell, a drunk genius can still do stupid things because they are drunk. Admittedly, these are extreme examples, but there are probably many more non-pathological or borderline pathological conditions that push people into irrational beliefs and behavior. I expect that religious and political extremists of all flavors may have similar neurological predispositions.

[EnergyUnlimited]

Self-proclaimed right-wingers had a more pronounced amygdala - a primitive part of the brain associated with emotion while their political opponents from the opposite end of the spectrum had thicker anterior cingulates.

There is some comparable research finding that semitic peoples (Jews and Arabs) have more pronounced amygdala and explanation was offered that larger amygdala are causing peoples to be irrational religious fanatics, what can easily be seen in Israel and Arab nations.
There was suggestion that peoples showing this trend (larger amygdala) might be in some sense inferior, albeit some more politically correct language ("excessively emotional") was used.

[Asterisk]

Fascinating study!!

For me, it actually explains quite a bit. I have often noticed that when debating conservatives/libertarians/creationists/climate deniers, they seem to suffer from the same EXACT inability to reason.

In all of the above cases, they have a strong belief that is unchangeable regardless of evidence, and the funny thing is that nearly all of them argue in exactly the same manner. In other words, if you look at the posts of climate deniers and compare them to the posts of conservatives/creationists/libertarians, you will notice an eerie and disturbing pattern of irrationality.

I suppose I'm just saying that it explains why it is impossible to debate conservatives/libertarians/creationists/climate deniers. They don't hold their beliefs because they have weighed the evidence and come to their conclusion...rather they hold their beliefs because they are HARD WIRED to have such beliefs before they were even born.

[EnergyUnlimited]

I suppose I'm just saying that it explains why it is impossible to debate conservatives/libertarians/creationists/climate deniers. They don't hold their beliefs because they have weighed the evidence and come to their conclusion...rather they hold their beliefs because they are HARD WIRED to have such beliefs before they were even born.

The same can be said about Liberals/Progressives etc.