New Study "Shows" That Liberals Are More Open to New Ideas

From the LA Times:

Exploring the neurobiology of politics, scientists have found that liberals tolerate ambiguity and conflict better than conservatives because of how their brains work.

In a simple experiment reported today in the journal Nature Neuroscience, scientists at New York University and UCLA show that political orientation is related to differences in how the brain processes information.

OK. That's a doozy, and a dangerous one. So we can now just ascribe our politics to our biology?

That'll never lead to a bad outcome. Never. Honestly.

Except that:

Participants were college students whose politics ranged from "very liberal" to "very conservative." They were instructed to tap a keyboard when an M appeared on a computer monitor and to refrain from tapping when they saw a W.

M appeared four times more frequently than W, conditioning participants to press a key in knee-jerk fashion whenever they saw a letter.

Each participant was wired to an electroencephalograph that recorded activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that detects conflicts between a habitual tendency (pressing a key) and a more appropriate response (not pressing the key). Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W, researchers said. Liberals and conservatives were equally accurate in recognizing M.

My first reaction to this was to be very, very surprised that the researchers would draw the conclusion they did from the experiment they performed. I have a comment and a question:

1) Journalists are under pressure to sensationalize study results in order to make them more "readable" or something. I hope that's what happened here.

2) Unless there is more proof, either in the study or in previous studies, that this sort of experiment is a valid way to measure something, color me skeptical.

Also, I guess, I'm not convinced from the study that causation was proved, merely correlation.

Oh yeah - it's almost impossible to translate one's political beliefs into neat categories like "liberal" and "conservative" since such categories are shorthand for a whole set of interlocking beliefs, values, issue positions, and worldviews, not all of which agree. I wonder if they let students self-identify...

Then there's this quote, buried at the very end of the story:

"Does this mean liberals and conservatives are never going to agree?" Amodio asked. "Maybe it suggests one reason why they tend not to get along."

Um, what? Who said anything about not being able to agree? I thought the study was about reacting to conflict and change, not agreement.

My larger point in posting this is simply that I think physiological and/or biological differences like that can develop over time in response to one's experiences. Because of that, even if the results of this study turn out to be accurate, I think it in no way indicates a predisposition or that one's political leanings are largely unavoidable.