I don’t have the time today to do other people’s legwork.
Your link from the eminent scientific journal “boston.com” does not address whether there are physical brain differences between so-called liberals and conservatives. There are such meaningful quotes as “Part of the answer lies in the way our brains are wired.” and “Our brains are designed to create cognitive shortcuts”, which are vaguely laughable in their over-simplicity.
Let’s not let this spin off into the typical “conservatives are teh evul ps Bush suxxors” thing in here, and address the specific claim that conservatives have distinct brain differences and are “less evolved” than liberals. I could also throw out the fact that trying to tie brain differences to conservatives is sort of laughable from the very start of the notion, given that “conservative” means an awful lot of things to an awful lot of people, and I question very strongly just how you or anyone else could accurately categorize someone as “conservative” or “liberal” except on specific issues, one at a time. What about a social liberal but fiscal conservative like myself? Or the reverse? What about the fact that the very definition of “conservative” has changed profoundly even within my brief lifetime, at least twice or more? What about separating fundamentalist Christian “religious right” conservatives (or Catholic conservatives like Pat Robertson) from people like George Will and William F. Buckley?
Without such firm distinctions and definitions, any claims that “conservatives do this” is sort of like saying “ever notice black people are like this?”
Why would you be doing other people’s legwork? I am content with what the article is saying. If you disagree then you have to do the legwork to show why it is wrong. If you can’t or won’t that is your choice but you’re not saving me any work if you don’t.
Boston.com is the website of The Boston Globe newspaper. They were reporting on a study…not performing their own study. Hardly surprising a newspaper reports science poorly…nothing new there. If you want to debunk the premise then debunk the study itself.
The OP already said that “evolved” was not the best choice of words.
Nevertheless we can work with it to an extent.
Humans evolved big brains to be able to master our environment. Instead of hunkering under a tree in fear that the sky gods are mad at us and making thunder we learned to build shelters and understand that thunder is a natural process. We got away from fear by understanding things better and mastering them.
Here though we have Republicans/conservatives deliberately misinforming and obfuscating to further their ends. They need to protect us from death panels? Sharia law? That stuff is not just idle, one-off rhetoric. They are concerted efforts at misinformation. Thirteen states are currently considering laws banning Sharia Law. Death panel fear went a long way toward derailing health care reform.
Now, you can wiggle and dance about “who” a conservative is but I think for the purposes here it is the people who pull the lever for republican candidates at the polling booth. Apparently there are enough of them out there to give republicans a majority in the House and nearly in the Senate.
Republicans would not peddle this bullshit unless it worked and clearly it works (dates back to their Southern Strategy). Despite “death panels” being completely untrue you can find plenty of examples of people freaking out over it. Did those conservative minds seek the truth? Clearly no. Did they listen to the truth when over and over it was pointed out that there were no death panels? No.
As the study I cited noted it seems a human condition to avoid information which does not comport with our preconceived notions but conservatives, in particular, become even more convinced of their wrong notions when faced with the correct answer. It is like believing that 2+2=5, then being shown how 2+2=4 and becoming more convinced that 2+2=5. It is willful ignorance.
As such I would say for humans, which evolved intellect as their primary survival trait, that this makes the conservative mind less “evolved”. They are the ones happier to worry about the sky gods being angry and reject someone telling them it is just some natural processes that makes the thunder.
All that said I agree “evolved” isn’t quite right here. I think we can go with willfully ignorant and/or just plain stupid to describe it.
No, that’s not how it works on the SDMB. The person touting the original claim (which is you) needs to back it up. Your “cite” does not satisfy, for the aforementioned reasons, most notably that it’s off-topic with respect to physiological differences in brains.
I’m a conservative and I didn’t agree with any of your Googled quotes. So? Maybe it’s not all conservatives, everywhere, after all…
What you hand-wave away as “wiggle and dance” is actually “verifying the scope and bounds of the allegation.” I was trained in several classes how to limit the scope of a study in order to make sure one draws proper, defensible conclusions. And that’s not “wiggle and dance”, sorry, and saying things like “Republicans and conservatives have smaller or less evolved brains” without scope limitation is ignorant and biased.
Is a William F. Buckley conservative exactly the same as a Pat Robertson conservative? Is a Sam Brownback conservative the same as a Arnold Schwarzenegger conservative? Is a Massachusetts conservative the same as an Alabama conservative? Gosh, it seems like there could be some differences one would need to consider here.
An example of how your “wiggle and dance” slur fails: there isn’t any effort shown by you to even break it down into RR versus non-RR conservatives. You don’t think that has a serious impact on accuracy? Really?
Here is the link to the study (PDF). From that link: “It would also be helpful to test additional corrections of liberal misperceptions. Currently, all of our backfire results come from conservatives – a finding that may provide support for the hypothesis that conservatives are especially dogmatic (Greenberg and Jonas 2003; Jost et al. 2003a, 2003b).”
Not sure what else you want.
What you propose is at the least a graduate level research project. That is the standard I should hold you to, on a message board, from now on?
It is common for statements such as, “Women are better verbally than men, men are better spatially than women.” Now you can proclaim that YOU are better spatially than all the men you know and it may well be true. Such statements are not refuted because you found one exception. The statement is noting a statistical regularity. In general it is a true statement when looking at the population as a whole.
I noted that republicans are in the majority in the House and a near majority in the Senate. Someone voted them in there…clearly a majority of voters. Republicans, as I have noted, engage in repeated falsehoods and misdirection on numerous topics. They are not punished for this by losing elections. They are rewarded for it and win elections. If it did not work to win an election they would not do it.
So, republicans spew complete falsehoods and a majority of people vote them into office.
“Evolution is about context” is actually a nonsense phrase. In biology, “Evolution” is about the progression, development, change, growth and adaptation of organisms to be more successful in their environments.
But of course, biology is not the only context in which the word “evolve” is used. It is also used to describe the growth, improvement and progression of many other things, and it pretty much always means evolving to be better, not worse. Particularly in light of the fact that there is an antonym for evolve, and that is devolve.
You didn’t understand what he was saying. Evolution is about context because it relates to the environment the particular critter is in. An undersea sulphur vent isn’t the same thing as a rainforest.
Still doesn’t make any sense in THIS context. Everyone I know understands “evolved” to mean advanced/improved/better, and I think everyone in this thread understands that meaning as well.
But if you prefer, recast the OP: “ARe liberals really more advanced/improved/better than conservatives?”
Then, after reading the OP and the link, you can, if you like, go on to debate whether the OP’s assumption that the attributes ascribed to liberals, which he assumes everyone will recognize as i*nherently more desirable *than the attributes ascribed to conservatives, which he also assumes everyone will recognize as less desirable, is in fact a valid assumption, completely apart from whether the study itself is valid.
What I wanted were papers which addressed the topic in the OP. I believe I stated this on more than one occasion. However, we also had a side-discussion about the specific study you linked to, so I’ll take a look at that, thank you. I will note that that study seems to be done by a student and an assistant professor, and no peer-reviewers are listed. As a paid peer-reviewer, I find that a bit unsettling from the get-go, but I’ll read through it on the plane later.
A graduate-level research project simply to recognize that a study like this has serious limitations? No, I’m talking about how such research is digested and analyzed, I’m not suggesting that you or I do this research (I suppose if Cecil finds this topic interesting enough, I may help out.) I think you think I’m saying something else.
You’re not there yet, but getting closer.
“Women” is fairly easy to define, if one defines “women” as “XX women.” Men are also easy to define, if one defines them as “XY men.” Which for all intents and purposes make up the vast majority of the population.
But the defintion of conservative and liberal are so hard to pin down, that without some specific guidelines and qualifiers any study like this immediately fails the second test of science, which is “know what you’re testing” (the first test being “know what it is you’re looking for”). I’m not going to repeat what I said earlier. The study would be much better off if it at least tried to look for patterns which broke down by religion, education level, socioeconomic status, ethnic heritage, etc. For example, I would be more interested in a study which said “white males between the age of 20 to 40 years who go to church at least once a week and who are registered Republican voters were found to have brains 10% smaller than the population.” This sort of multi-variable analysis isn’t that hard to do in this age of computers if you have the survey data.
Don’t look to me to defend the indefensible. You think I like seeing conservative ideals ass-fucked by opportunistic and evil men and women, mostly as a result of the religious right? You don’t think I shudder every time I hear the words “intelligent design” and “Kansas” in the same sentence? I’m saying that studies trying to link brain morphology to an over-broad definition of political leanings are invalid and not worth wasting time on. I gave examples earlier in the thread of why I feel it is over-broad.
I’m willing to give the OP a pass since he did use quote marks. That tells me he knows he not using the term correctly; ie, as a scientist would use it.
I don’t believe the cited study for a second. But if it were true, people who changed would be like bisexuals who go through phases of which sex they prefer.
Now obviously there’s a biological basis for believing anything. There’s a biological reason my favorite color is blue instead of brown. But the funny thing about this study is imagining these huge differences between American conservatives and liberals, of all things. I’d be interested in what they’d say about people with might really have different modes of thinking, like theocrats or monks or anarchists or collectivists or communists or socialists or royalists or martyrs or the Amish or the Inuit or Confucian ancestry worshippers or…actually they’d probably be pretty similar too, but at least it wouldn’t be a punch line.
The OP and posts like it are nothing short of hilarious. Liberals really believe they are smarter, better people than conservatives. Conservatives usually blame themselves when they lose elections, figuring they didn’t do a good enough job explaining their positions. But liberals blame the voters when they lose. Instead of changing their positions, they try to change the electorate through immigration or by revising textbooks to make liberal policies look better. That strategy has actually been largely successful. A proud liberal would naturally see this as moral advancement. The consent of the governed doesn’t enter into it.
I assume you are a native speaker of English and are aware of the thousands of words that have multiple correct meanings. The word “evolve” is one such word. The OP used it correctly.
Not when he pretends to use it in a scientific context. He also brutalizes the concept of primitive brain. He takes a bunch of scientific terminology and just makes it whatever he wants. Like when intelligent design advocates take their everyday usage of the word theory to mean the equivalent of a theory in science.
No, I’m talking about how such research is digested and analyzed, I’m not suggesting that you or I do this research (I suppose if Cecil finds this topic interesting enough, I may help out.) I think you think I’m saying something else.