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Liberal InterpretationRigging a study to make conservatives look stupid.

By William Saletan
Posted Friday, Sept. 14, 2007, at 9:28 AM ET
Illustration by Rob Donnelly. Click image to expand.

Are liberals smarter than conservatives?

It looks that way, according to a study published this week in Nature Neuroscience. In a rapid response test—you press a button if you're given one signal, but not if you're given a different signal—the authors found that conservatives were "more likely to make errors of commission," whereas "stronger liberalism was correlated with greater accuracy." They concluded that "a more conservative orientation is related to greater persistence in a habitual response pattern, despite signals that this response pattern should change."

Does this mean liberal brains are fitter? Apparently. "Liberals are more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty," the authors wrote. New York University, which helped fund the study, concluded, "Liberals are more likely than are conservatives to respond to cues signaling the need to change habitual responses." The study's lead author, NYU professor David Amodio, told London's Daily Telegraph that "liberals tended to be more sensitive and responsive to information that might conflict with their habitual way of thinking."

Habitual way of thinking. Informational complexity. Need to change. Those are sweeping terms. They imply that conservatives, on average, are adaptively weaker at thinking, not just button-pushing. And that implication has permeated the press. The Los Angeles Times told readers that the study "suggests that liberals are more adaptable than conservatives" and "might be better judges of the facts." Agence France Presse reported that conservatives in the study "were less flexible, refusing to deviate from old habits 'despite signals that this ... should be changed.' " The Guardian asserted, "Scientists have found that the brains of people calling themselves liberals are more able to handle conflicting and unexpected information."

These reports convey four interwoven claims. First, conservatives cling more inflexibly to old ways of thinking. Second, they're less responsive to information. Third, they're more obtuse to complexity and ambiguity. Fourth, they're less likely to change when the evidence says they should.

Let's take the claims one by one.

1. Habitual ways of thinking. Here's what the experiment actually entailed, according to the authors' supplementary document:

[E]ither the letter "M" or "W" was presented in the center of a computer monitor screen. … Half of the participants were instructed to make a "Go" response when they saw "M" but to make no response when they saw "W"; the remaining participants completed a version in which "W" was the Go stimulus and "M" was the No–Go stimulus. … Responses were registered on a computer keyboard placed in the participants' laps. … Participants received a two-minute break halfway through the task, which took approximately 15 minutes to complete.

Fifteen minutes is a habit? Tapping a keyboard is a way of thinking? Come on. You can make a case for conservative inflexibility, but not with this study.

2. Responsiveness to information. Again, let's consult the supplementary document:

Each trial began with a fixation point, presented for 500 ms. The target then appeared for 100 ms, followed by a blank screen. Participants were instructed to respond within 500 ms of target onset. A "Too slow!" warning message appeared after responses that exceeded this deadline, and "Incorrect" feedback was given after erroneous responses.

An "ms"—millisecond—is one-thousandth of a second. That means participants had one-tenth of a second to look at the letter and another four-tenths of a second to hit the button. One letter, one-tenth of a second. This is "information"?

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William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.
Illustration by Rob Donnelly.
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Remarks from the Fray:

Saletan's critique is silly. Conservatives performed objectively less well than liberals at this particular task. Full stop. It is reasonable to conclude that there might be some real life problems at which conservatives also perform less well. The question is how relevant this particular task is to real life problems. My guess is probably not very, but who knows?

However, it is not reasonable to presume that based on conservatives performing less well at this task, there must be other tasks at which conservatives would perform better, which seems to be Saletan's major point. It's a completely unfounded leap that doing a lousier job at one task implies that you would do a better job at another.

When Saletan loses at tennis, does he announce that he must be a good bowler?

--mnemon

(To reply, click here.)

Mr. Saletan's assertion that "our standard of "information" is a bit tougher than the blips and fads you fall for" to truly defies logic. The standards of information used by conservatives to plunge this nation into a war were absurd at the very least.

For conservatives science is a buffet where you pick what you like and dismiss what you find inconvenient. Despite the fact that the vast majority of scientists, around the world, and across many fields of study, support the conclusion that global warming in driven my human activity, conservatives dismiss it as lacking sufficient evidence. Conversely, the pseudo-science of intelligent design is accepted as fact despite lacking anything resembling real scientific support.

--MtnMig

(To reply, click here.)

The experiment, like much of science, is a model, a reduction... It strips down most variables in order to focus on one thing. A result like this can't be interpreted on its own, and it's always possible to claim that a model has no bearing on a complex reality. It may require an intuitive leap, but this result suggests greater adaptability and flexibility in liberals as compared to conservatives. Surely, these attributes are not always themselves adaptive, and don't always serve society well. I'm a liberal, but it seems to me that resistance to new information has benefits for the individual and the group--which is why these traits have stuck around. Too much openness, too much lability, can surely be bad for a family, community, or state. The way to avoid this may be to admit less information into consideration.

--ytomer

(To reply, click here.)

The variables define any 'scientific' study. In this case, the symbols must be neutral in content or connotative meaning, or else noting them with speed would be a reflection of imprinted meaning rather than simple focus. The use of the letter W on politically minded Americans is hardly a neutral path. 'W' over the last years has gathered huge significance, particularly to the left. Oddly, the study showed NO significant difference between conservatives and liberals on the letter M. Such a significant change must be explained before any conclusions can be reached, since it implies an unknown factor in the variable itself.

--bernieb

(To reply, click here.)

The study can reach the conclusion "liberals are smarter than conservatives" only by making the sort of unscientific, intuitive, and ultimately indefensible leap of faith which science should never make. There is a lot more to adaptive intelligence than can be measured by a few minutes of button-pushing.

Yet it is axiomatic that the body of conservatives has less education on average than their liberal counterparts. Liberal perspective: higher education loosens up and improves adaptive intelligence. Conservative perspective: higher education brainwashes people into becoming liberals. Scientific perspective: the study of the brain is so embryonic and incomplete that we can't explain satisfactorily why people think as they do about much of anything.

In the absence of a firm biochemical understanding of how the brain operates, pursuing such conclusions is like building castles out of sand. I'll side with William on this one.

--UrgeIt

(To reply, click here.)

Much of the article was hand-waving and weak arguments against standard methods in cognitive psych. I am not a big fan of the study. I believe that their population sample was not truly random and that to say anything robust about liberals/conservatives you would need to sample from urban and rural areas across the whole country. A quick power analysis also indicates that they should probably have 50 people per group for a modest effect size with a standard t-test - though ERP studies tend to have their own funny methods. I have other issues with the study as well, but I think you get my point.

The Amodio paper isn't a great example of scientific progress. There may very well be differences between liberals and conservatives, but studies with more powerful designs are needed. If studies like this are to be assailed they should be criticized on their weak points, not on their premise.

--prefrontal

(To reply, click here.)

(9/15)

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