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Reactions To Disgusting Images Predict a Persons Political Ideology
LuxuryYacht writes A new study shows that the way your brain responds to photos of of maggots, mutilated carcasses, and gunk in the kitchen sink gives a pretty good indication of whether you're liberal or conservative. "Remarkably, we found that the brain's response to a single disgusting image was enough to predict an individual's political ideology," Read Montague, a Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute psychology professor who led the study, said in a written statement. 83 men and women viewed a series of images while having their brains scanned in a functional MRI (fMRI) machine. The images included the disgusting photos described above, along with photos of babies and pleasant landscapes. Afterward, the participants were asked to rate how grossed out they were by each photo. They also completed a survey about their political beliefs, which included questions about their attitudes toward school prayer, gun control, immigration, and gay marriage. There was no significant difference in how liberals and conservatives rated the photos. But the researchers noted differences between the two groups in the activity of brain regions associated with disgust recognition, emotion regulation, attention and even memory. The differences were so pronounced that the researchers could analyze a scan and predict the person's political leaning with 95 percent accuracy.
The "issues" appear to be from the American political arena, which is about as much about political ideology as World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. is about sports. They're also highly polarised, in that they all come in red and blue versions with no alternative views possible, that are then conveniently grouped such that anyone leaning toward either colour in any one issue is then expected to be leaning toward matching colours in the other issues.
So what does this study tell us? I think we're seeing two cases of pervading and mutually opposed groupthink, where the patterns have become distinctive enough to be discernible -- recall that limited "thought readers" already exist. In other words, I don't see a necessity for biological predisposition here. It could be, but do note that to people used to multi-party systems (n>>2), "American politics" looks like an one-party system consisting of two factions that are only interested in duking it out with the other group, to the point of (either faction) being willing to shut down the government over some petty squabble or other. In other words, the discerning this thing does is really quite limited because the source spectrum is so poorly populated with just two possible inputs that are strongly polarised against each other to boot.
I've never considered my political ideology to be something that exists on a linear scale. How I feel about a particular political issue is often different from the feelings of either of the large political groups, and where my feelings align with those of political groups, I have some that align with people of groups considered to be at either end of this scale. I could be mistaken in thinking that other people are similar to me this way, but when I read about a study that first confines political ideology to a linear scale, and then uses [insert method] to predict where one lands on that scale, I have to give some thought to the possibility of inherent confirmation bias in the design of the system.
You should probably say that these are aborted babies. Some people might have a high gore threshold but still might see these as triggers.
Go to a mosque and talk to a muslim. You might learn something.
I try to avoid crazy people who believe in imaginary bullcrap.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
According to Pew Research, Americans are 0.6% Muslim.
http://religions.pewforum.org/...
Where did you find 20%?
-Dave