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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

(Continued from page 1)

3. Complexity and ambiguity. Go back and look at the first word of the excerpt from the supplementary document. The word is either. Participants were shown an M or a W. No complexity, no ambiguity. You could argue that showing them a series of M's and then surprising them with a W injects some complexity and ambiguity. But that complexity is crushed by the simplicity of the letter choice and the split-second deadline. As Amodio explained to the Sacramento Bee, "It's too quick for you to think consciously about what you're doing." So, why did he impose such a brutal deadline? "It needs to be hard enough that people make a lot of errors," he argued, since—in the Bee's paraphrase of his remarks—"the errors are the most interesting thing to study."

In other words, complexity and ambiguity weren't tested; they were excluded. The study was designed to prevent them—and conscious thought in general—because, for the authors' purposes, such lifelike complications would have made the results less interesting. Personally, I'd be more interested in a study that invited such complications—examining, for instance, whether conservatives, having resisted doubts about the wisdom of the status quo, are more likely than liberals to doubt the wisdom of change.

4. Maladaptiveness. The scientific core of the study is a hypothesized brain function called "conflict monitoring." The reason why liberals scored better than conservatives, the authors argued, is that the brain area responsible for this function was, by electrical measurement, more active in them than in conservatives.

The authors described CM as "a general mechanism for detecting when one's habitual response tendency is mismatched with responses required by the current situation." NYU's press release called it "a mechanism for detecting when a habitual response is not appropriate for a new situation." Amodio told the press that CM was "the process of detecting conflict between an ongoing pattern of behavior and a signal that says that something's wrong with that behavior and you need to change it."

The indictment sounds scientific: CM spots errors; conservatives are less sensitive to CM; therefore, conservatives make more errors. But the original definition of CM, written six years ago by the researchers who hypothesized it, didn't presume that the habitual response was wrong, inappropriate, or objectively mismatched with current requirements. It presumed only that a stimulus had challenged the habit. According to the original definition, CM is "a system that monitors for the occurrence of conflicts in information processing." It "evaluates current levels of conflict, then passes this information on to centers responsible for control, triggering them to adjust the strength of their influence on processing."

In experiments such as Amodio's, the habit is objectively wrong: You tapped the button, and the researcher knows that what you saw was a W. But real life is seldom that simple. Maybe what you saw—what you think you saw—will turn out to require a different response from the one that has hitherto served you well. Maybe it won't. Maybe, on average, extra sensitivity to such conflicting cues will lead to better decisions. Maybe it won't. Extra CM sensitivity does make you more likely to depart from your habit. But that doesn't prove it's more adaptive.

Frank Sulloway, a Berkeley professor who co-authored a damning psychological analysis of conservatism four years ago, illustrates the problem. Appearing in the Times as a researcher "not connected to the study"—despite having co-written his similar 2003 analysis with one of its authors—Sulloway endorsed the study and pointed out, "There is ample data from the history of science showing that social and political liberals indeed do tend to support major revolutions in science." That's true: When new ideas turn out to be right, liberals are vindicated. But when new ideas turn out to be wrong, they cease to be "revolutions in science," so it's hard to keep score of liberalism's net results. And that's in science, where errors, being relatively factual, are easiest to prove and correct. In culture and politics, errors can be unrecoverable.

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.

In fact, that's exactly what you've done in this study: You've manufactured a tiny world of letters, half-seconds, and button-pushing, so you can catch us in clear errors and keep out the part of life where our tendencies correct yours. And now you feel great about yourselves. Congratulations. You haven't told us much about our way of thinking. But you've told us a lot about yours.

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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.)

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