neuroscience and nuance
This study in Nature Neuroscience (conducted by New York University’s David Amodio) has an unsurprising abstract:
Political scientists and psychologists have noted that, on average, conservatives show more structured and persistent cognitive styles, whereas liberals are more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty. We tested the hypothesis that these profiles relate to differences in general neurocognitive functioning using event-related potentials, and found that greater liberalism was associated with stronger conflict-related anterior cingulate activity, suggesting greater neurocognitive sensitivity to cues for altering a habitual response pattern.
The LA Times article often cited as a reference to the study has this analysis:
Frank J. Sulloway, a researcher at UC Berkeley's Institute of Personality and Social Research who was not connected to the study, said the results "provided an elegant demonstration that individual differences on a conservative-liberal dimension are strongly related to brain activity."Analyzing the data, Sulloway said liberals were 4.9 times as likely as conservatives to show activity in the brain circuits that deal with conflicts, and 2.2 times as likely to score in the top half of the distribution for accuracy. […] Based on the results, he said, liberals could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas. [emphasis added]
It appears as if the much-derided concept of nuance, mischaracterized by the media as “flip-flopping” when exhibited by Democrats, has a basis in neurology. Reflection and consideration, of course, are not always appropriate; the trick is to determine which types of tasks are better suited to Republicans (rote) and Democrats (deliberative). As the study’s authors observed (h/t: John Holbo at Crooked Timber):
Taken together, our results are consistent with the view that political orientation, in part, reflects individual differences in the functioning of a general mechanism related to cognitive control and self-regulation. Stronger conservatism (versus liberalism) was associated with less neurocognitive sensitivity to response conflicts. At the behavioral level, conservatives were also more likely to make errors of commission. Although a liberal orientation was associated with better performance on the response-inhibition task examined here, conservatives would presumably perform better on tasks in which a more fixed response style is optimal.
I hope that this study inspires more investigative work in the neurocognitive arena.
update (9/14 @ 4:23pm):
The study from Nature Neuroscience is available (140KB PDF) from NYU (h/t: John Holbo at Crooked Timber).
update 2 (9/15 @ 7:30pmpm):
Will Saletan criticizes the study in this piece at Slate:
The conservative case against this study is easy to make. Sure, we're fonder of old ways than you are. That's in our definition. Some of our people are obtuse; so are some of yours. If you studied the rest of us in real life, you'd find that while we second-guess the status quo less than you do, we second-guess putative reforms more than you do, so in terms of complexity, ambiguity, and critical thinking, it's probably a wash. Also, our standard of "information" is a bit tougher than the blips and fads you fall for. Sometimes, these inclinations lead us astray. But over the long run, they've served us and society pretty well. It's just that you notice all the times we were wrong and ignore all the times we were right.