Diary Of A Mad Voter: Jessica Peck Corry

Academic “Research” Pushes Political Agenda

By Jessica Peck Corry, 9-13-07

If you can’t handle conflict, uncertainty, or new ideas, you must be a conservative. This is the bigoted conclusion being tossed about in the aftermath of a new university study alleging that the brains of conservatives and liberals work very differently.

In a haphazard experiment released this month in Nature Neuroscience, scientists from New York University and the University of California at Los Angeles claim that they have successfully navigated the neurobiology of politics, and in doing so, have discovered that certain brain activity can be directly tied to an individual’s political ideology.

Those endorsing the study’s findings say they show that liberals were nearly five times as likely as conservatives to show activity in the brain circuits that deal with conflicts, and more than twice as likely to accurately answer study questions.

Call me a skeptic. How can scientists tie brain function to socially constructed political distinctions that are constantly changing? The bottom line: They can’t.

The first problem with such a study is its methodology. After all, who decides just what exactly constitutes conservative or liberal? According to researchers, 43 study volunteers, over a period of 500 different trials, were asked to rate their political leanings based on a scale from negative five (considered “extremely liberal") to positive five ("very conservative").

Participants were then given a computerized test designed to test their ability to break from habitual responses.

Here is how the study worked:

A bunch of college kids, first asked to define their political ideology, were then put in front of computers and wired to machines that recorded activity in the anterior cingulated cortex, the part of the brain that detects conflicts between habitual tendencies and a more appropriate response.

Specifically, participants were instructed to tap a keyboard when an M appeared and to refrain from tapping when they saw a W. Showing their sneaky resolve, researchers designed the study to ensure that the letter M appeared four times more frequently than W, something they say conditioned participants to press a key in “knee-jerk” fashion whenever they saw a letter.

Researchers used responses to support a conclusion that liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives. There are countless problems with such a conclusion—but I’ll limit my analysis to just a few of the more obvious weaknesses.

Anyone who has spent more than five minutes on a college campus knows that the vast majority of young political activists treasure passion over reason.

And while they may eagerly define themselves with one political ideology over another, they may not fully understand the confines and opportunities within different political or economic arguments. As a result, today’s liberals can be tomorrow’s conservatives.

Let’s say that instead, however, the participants had all been tenured professors at an Ivy League institution, well-educated in different political ideologies. Allowing participants to self-define is still problematic.

An expert on America’s founding principles may define himself as a liberal due to his commitment to “classical” liberalism’s individualism and free markets (a concept today associated with conservative causes).

Meanwhile, a Marxist women’s studies professor may define herself “liberal” based on her loyalty to educating students on the values of social collectivism.

According to researchers, which professor would qualify as the true liberal?

The study’s findings are also problematic because they assume that a person’s physical or psychological ability to respond to changing letter patterns on a computer screen somehow translates into their willingness to accept social or political change.

Every day, life events change who we are and our willingness to accept new politically-charged concepts.

A conservative minister’s son coming out of the closet will likely impact the family’s views on homosexuality, just as a liberal homeowner may second guess the virtues of high taxation when he’s faced with a property tax bill he can’t afford.

While the study’s conclusions remain highly questionable, using science to bash conservatives as a close-mind class is nothing new. Frequently in the past, academics have published their polemics parading as legitimate psychological studies.

According to a Los Angeles Times report: “Previous psychological studies have found that conservatives tend to be more structured and persistent in their judgments whereas liberals are more open to new experiences.”

As a policy analyst specializing in higher education, I frequently hear similarly dangerous ideas espoused as fact. Most common—there aren’t as many conservative college professors because conservatives care more about making money than they do about investing in public service careers like teaching. Such rhetoric wrongly assumes that conservatives aren’t discriminated against every day in the hiring process—a fact I’ve witnessed on multiple occasions.

It also assumes that professors today are lowly public servants, when in fact many are pulling down six-figure salaries, paid vacations and posh benefits. It’s a lifestyle many private sector capitalists can only envy from afar.

While the study’s lead author, David Amodio, an NYU assistant psychology professor, has publicly cautioned against making widespread conclusions about any potential for the ideological supremacy of liberals, the study’s botched methodology gives ample opportunity for those seeking to do so.

Such hesitation should be applauded—but certainly wasn’t properly explored in any major media coverage. The message sent was clear: conservatives are bigots—slow to accept new ideas and unable to embrace change.

In the Los Angeles Times coverage, Frank J. Sulloway, a well-known visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley’s Institute of Personality and Social Research, says such results “provided an elegant demonstration” that liberals are more likely to accept social, scientific, or religious ideas. Might be a nice idea if we could just figure out how to define liberals and conservatives.

Just as we can’t find an answer to every social problem solely by turning to public policy, we can’t explain away human behavior by looking at brain scans. Human beings, for good or bad, are just too complicated for such an elementary analysis.

Editor’s note: Jessica Peck Corry’s weekly blogs are part of a new feature on NewWest.Net/Politics called “Diary of a Mad Voter,” a group blog, published in partnership with the Denver Post’s Politics West intended give a glimpse into the hearts and minds of several independent-minded voters and thinkers in the Rocky Mountain West in the ‘08 election cycle. Check back this week at www.newwest.net/madvoter.

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