I mean, you train people in a task that tends to produce a knee-jerk reaction. Some people, when given the other, non-knee-jerk stimulus, show more brain activity than others do, and make fewer erroneous knee-jerk reactions. These people are called liberals.

I guess that would be hard for a conervative brain to understand.

The point is a factor that must be considered while judging peoples political leanings is their environment. What people see and do has an extreme effect on how they think. Americans who sit around listening to talk shows all day become convinced they are conservatives, and that the nasty liberal New York Times is out to get them. Most often I would assume they have never read a single New York Times article or editorial, so they just take the blowhards word that its liberal. The truth is if more Americans had a chance to see how the rest of the world is they would realize its ok to be liberal, its something to be proud of.

It always starts the same way, taking some bit in context completely out of context then amplifying the conflation to some steady number in the population who can be totally depended upon not to look any further.

It’s important to remember that a host of factors, including environmental ones exert effects on a finished person. The most hair-trigger responses from a few conservative bloggers though anecdotal, are humorous to the extent that they make the case of those they are arguing against. Evidently, sublteties elude them.

It is almost as if some primal ability to sort into categories, boxes, or mental partitions has gone awry. On the one hand everything gets sorted nice and tidy…a place for everything and everything in its place. The problem is that the end of sorting through things is sacrificed to the means of sorting accurately.

Call them boxes or rhetorical frames of reference, the inescapable backdrop to arguments between those who might oversimplify their categories (and resist accomodating explanations of the “gray areas” into their system) vs. those whose world view might take more facets or the objects being sorted into account (thus appearing maddeningly complex or even contradictory to those who do not) is that one side has a simple flawed message and the other is left resorting to either demonstrations of flawed thinking or complex solutions.

Complex solutions can easily be eploited as Pandora’s boxes, require work to understand and validate, and are more often approached as something unknown with concomitant fear.

Headaches always arise from acting on a messy, unrealistic schema of reality that is not highly invested in fact. The energy required to maintain an idealized, innacurate, and incomplete world view in light of its chinks and the inevitable assault on it by reality is tremendous. Certainly this is what we see with the likes of Ted Haggard and more recently, an outgoing Sentaor from Idaho.

These are just the most extreme tips of the iceberg as manifested as hypocrisy at the most fundamental levels. Still, their cognitive/emotional soulmates in government and the media who fudge their reasoning at higher levels, where both intent and results are more difficult to access, fight tooth and nail to ward off the paper cuts imposed by the preponderance of truth.

Similarly to the studies Maha cites, there are some interesting studies of the brain that reveal what happens when emotional centers are either damaged or must be excised. The afflicted lose their ability to think. Ennui sets in and the ability to gain momentum (as that incorporated in checking facts, testing hypotheses, and delving into gray areas that makes sorting into boxes a real pain) in almost any direction is lost. With the loss of these emotional center’s functioning goes the ability to think as well.

A lot has also been written about differences in thinking between conservatives and liberals that are attributed to the limbic system, the part of the brain uses for storing, collating, and retrieving impressions of threats. Studies reveal a correlation between heightened limbic system activity and political identification.

There is no shortage of literature on any of these topics but adapting ones world view to the can only be made more difficult by integrating what has increasingly become accepted as scientific fact.

The canard about lefties being emotional and not operating out of reason says more about how that wingnut is clueless about his own emotions, motivations and projections, and how he has to mash the data through this belief, instead of just seeing it as it is. His comment is an example of exactly what the experiment was testing, whether one steers toward rigid adherence to dogma, or whether one is open to novelty.

Sometime ago, I was tempted to write and surreptitiously install a computer program on a wingnut co-worker’s computer, that would flash a large “DUH” on his screen as well as sounding it out whenever said wingnut hit the “W” key. This psych experiment kind of does the same thing, on a massive scale.