

Left wing or right wing? It's written in the brain - Anchor
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/1012/10122301

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philk
_Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners, Professor Rees and his
colleague Dr Ryota Kanai at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL
(University College London) analysed the brain structures of ninety young
adults who had reported their political attitudes on a scale from 'very
conservative' to 'very liberal'. They found a strong correlation between an
individual's view and the structure of the brain, particularly two regions._

Maybe someone can correct me but this also looks like "we MRIed a small number
of students and then compared so many brain structures that we'd be bound to
find some sort of correlation with their dubious self reported political
leanings."

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hoxinsox
Agreed. One wouldn't think of analysing, say, _Firefox_ by photographing
inside a computer.

That, coupled with the depressing tendency in politics to think that people
who disagree must be mentally ill somehow, makes the whole business shudder-
worthy.

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ths
The projection of as complex and multidimensional a thing as political views
onto a one-dimensional left-right or liberal-conservative axis is necessarily
an oversimplification. For example, would libertarians be classified as
conservatives using this analysis because of their free-market emphasis? Would
big-government neocons be classified as liberals because of their fondness for
big government? If that is the case, I expect that a lot of "lefties" and
"liberals" would demonstrate a "right-wing" or "conservative" mindset (and
vice versa) if they participated in a similar examination.

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iwwr
It's simply that the vast majority of people fit in that left-right axis.

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pelle
I really don't think them majority of people fit on a simple line. It's more
that that is presented as the only option.

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iwwr
If we plot a Nolan chart, people would be heavily clustered along the
leftwing-rightwing diagonal, with some variance, of course, but a strong trend
nonetheless.

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pelle
What worries me most about this is that a prominent UK university is using the
American term "Liberal" to mean left wing.

Outside the US "liberal" generally means what we call classically liberal in
the US or borderline libertarian.

That liberal means left wing in the US is extremely confusing for non
Americans.

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noarchy
I've noticed that in the US, the term "liberal" carries a high level of
baggage, and seems to elicit reactions from all sides. I suppose that this
could be due to the influence of right-of-centre talk radio, where the term
seems to be particularly demonized.

Here in Canada, "Liberal" is a major political party, as is "Conservative".
With that said, we have several other parties in Parliament, as well.

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cstross
As noted (towards the end of the article): correlation does not imply
causation.

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iwwr
Strictly speaking, the brain is the physical manifestation of the mind, so
aspects of the mind would be bound to be related to physical phenomena in the
brain. What's uncertain is if this study actually found a physical thing, or
random data.

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nickpinkston
As someone who grew up hyper conservative and has been becoming liberalized
ever since - I can't help thinking this study is off. Did my brain structure
really change, or was I a lib-brainer the whole time?

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antidaily
And here I thought we just voted how our parents do.

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RyanMcGreal
Breaking news: mental cognitive models are reflected in brain structure. Film
at eleven.

