Slashdot Mirror
Is "Left" Vs. "Right" Hard-coded Into Your Brain?
New submitter kyjellyfish writes "Research published in the journal PLOS ONE, suggests that your parents 'Left
or 'Right' party affiliations are not the only factor at work shaping a person's political identity. Differences in opinion between 'Lefties' and 'Righties' may reflect specific physiological processes. In research performed over 10 years ago, brain scans showed that London cab drivers' gray matter grew larger to help them store a mental map of the city."
From the article: "Other scans have shown that brain regions associated with risk and uncertainty, such as the fear-processing amygdala, differ in structure in liberals and conservatives. And different architecture means different behavior. Liberals tend to seek out novelty and uncertainty, while conservatives exhibit strong changes in attitude to threatening situations. The former are more willing to accept risk, while the latter tends to have more intense physical reactions to threatening stimuli."
No, what the article is saying is that Liberals are less likely to think through the consequences of their risk taking - which could be part of the reason they feel the need to build a "social safety net" to make sure that they don't spend the remainder of their days pissing into a diaper as a result of their "novelty and uncertainty seeking" behavior. In short, liberals are immature children who don't consider the consequences of their actions before acting.
Conservatives, on the other hand, understand the severity of the risks they're taking and so tend to steer clear of extremely risky behavior. They are essentially overly-protective parents who like to minimize risk by thinking through the likely consequences before they engage in risky behavior, and avoid behaviors they feel are too risky.
This isn't an article that proves "liberals good, conservatives bad," dumbfuck.