Brain Differences In Liberals and Conservatives

i_like_spam writes "Scientists from NYU and UCLA report in Nature Neuroscience that the brains of Democrats and Republicans process information differently. This new study finds that the differences are apparent even when the brain processes common information, not just political topics. From the study, liberals were more likely to be accurate and showed more brain activity in the region associated with analyzing conflicts. A researcher not affiliated with the study stated, liberals 'could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas.' Moreover, 'the results could explain why President Bush demonstrated a single-minded commitment to the Iraq war and why some people perceived Sen. John F. Kerry... as a flip-flopper.'"

Comments

liberals

[smittyoneeach]

liberals 'could be expected to more readily accept new ... religious ideas.'

I'll admit publicly that, while quite ecumenical and tolerant towards others, I don't really think there have been any new religious ideas of significant value in, say, 2,000-ish years.
On the contrary, when you look at that New Testament in depth, most of the ideas put forth were not terribly new, but were actually pointers to older ideas.

One highly subjective, criminally over-simplified take on the whole liberal/conservative question is: it boils down to one of modeling society. If you want "one big family" then you lean to the left, and want more socialized policies. If you question whether people scale well and want more individual responsibility and less safety net, then you might prefer conservative policies.
I'm looking forward to further research that correlates liberal/conservative preference with population density. It seems that the more urbanized people are, the greater the comfort level with shifting responsibility/authority to the government.
Good news, bad news: who can say?

Re:Just In!

[John Straffin]

From http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/text/france.html

American Revolution
- In a move that will become quite familiar to future Americans, France claims a win even though the English colonists saw far more action. This is later known as "de Gaulle Syndrome", and leads to the Second Rule of French Warfare; "France only wins when America does most of the fighting."