

Researchers show that liberals and conservatives approach everyday decisions differently. - amichail
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-politics10sep10,0,5982337.story

======
rkts
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"

to

"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.

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

~~~
gwenhwyfaer
[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.

~~~
pg
You're correct. One user downmodded every comment on this thread. Maybe I'll
add protections against that. In the meantime I upmodded them all myself.

~~~
mojuba
I thought this is politics without even reading the article and was so angry I
downmodded all 3 or 4 comments that were here. Sorry about that. I just don't
want HN to be another reddit.

~~~
gwenhwyfaer
It may have been posted as a political link, but the methodology was so flawed
that it became interesting anyway. :)

As for my interest: I quit a psych degree after a year because the teaching of
experimental psychology convinced me that it isn't a serious science.
Experiments like this are sadly not uncommon - experimenters decide what they
want to quantify, but then measure whatever they can, no matter how tenuous
the link between the two.

------
andreyf
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
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.

------
gwenhwyfaer
What about libertarians (of either pole)?

------
aswanson
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](http://youtube.com/watch?v=YENbElb5-xY&feature=bz100)

