Searching for reasons why liberals and conservatives view the world differently is a popular academic sport, and the results, especially if they can be interpreted as unfavorable to conservatives, are likely to be widely reported.
So the attention paid to a paper titled “Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism,” announced online by the journal Nature Neuroscience Sep. 9 (abstract) is unsurprising. Two authors, including the lead author, David Amodio, are in the Department of Psychology at New York University, and the two others are from UCLA.
The paper’s abstract points to a body of research indicating that “conservatives show more structured and persistent cognitive styles, whereas liberals are more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty.” The authors tested this on a group of undergraduates by measuring what happened in a specific region of the brain (the anterior cingulate cortex, if you must know) while they performed a simple “Go/No-Go” task. They were supposed to respond “Go” to one symbol, presented 80 percent of the time in 500 trials, and “No-Go” to the other.
The whole process took about 15 minutes, and because the “Go” symbol was so much more common, participants quickly came to treat it as the default option, and were more likely to make errors on the relatively few times they should have responded “No-Go.”
If you’ve ever used a spell-check program where the default option is “replace” you know exactly how easy it is to make errors of that kind.
Students who self-identified as “conservative” on a questionnaire they filled out before doing the task made more such errors than those who said they were “liberal.”
Thing is, the symbols the researchers chose were “M” and “W.” Perhaps it had escaped their notice, but “W” has a political resonance that “M” does not. Roughly half of the participants (not exactly, because there were 43 of them) had the political W as the Go symbol, and half had the political W as the No-Go symbol. If the goal is to tease out a connection between political orientation and measurements of electrical currents on the scalp, these are not equivalent tasks.
Also, 43 is not a large number of subjects in any case, and according to one reader only seven of them called themselves conservatives. That’s a rather skimpy sample from which to infer anything about conservatives in general. (The paper is apparently available online only to subscribers, although Dave Munger worked up a test version of the task you can try at home. He says it’s harder than you think.)
Asking undergraduates about their political views generally elicits answers about policy issues. It’s a stretch to go from that to judgments about flexibility and openness to change; the students probably weren’t thinking about that. In the waning years of the Soviet Union, it was common to hear those who wanted to preserve Soviet communism referred to as conservatives, although Soviet communism is about as far as you can get from conservative ideas about economic policy and the proper role of government.
It’s a stretch, though, that the researchers seem prepared to make.
“Say you drive home from work the same way every day, but one day there’s a detour and you need to override your autopilot,” Amodio said, according to a story in the Chicago Tribune. “Most people function just fine. But there’s a little variability in how sensitive people are to the cue that they need to change their current course.”
Anyone want to bet how long it took for this research to be applied to President Bush and the war in Iraq?
Linda Seebach is an online columnist who blogs at www.lindaseebach.net.