Politics and Religion

I'm wondering if they tested Independents, if they would find...
mattradd 40 Reviews 4410 reads
posted

that they had larger anterior cingulates than the Liberals, since Liberals can be just as reactive as Conservatives, where as Independents may be more likely to activate mental processes to consider the validity, and invalidity of the arguments from both sides.

Priapus531911 reads

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-- Modified on 4/11/2011 4:27:17 PM

that they had larger anterior cingulates than the Liberals, since Liberals can be just as reactive as Conservatives, where as Independents may be more likely to activate mental processes to consider the validity, and invalidity of the arguments from both sides.

Sample bias in such things is ridiculous, furthermore, this treads on some pretty shaky ground.

There is a school of thought that cranial capacity correlates positively with intelligence. In essence, the size of a given area of brain matter is predictive regarding the person's capacities. One may find a great deal of such data from people who were intent on proving that some races were intellectually superior to others based upon these "objective" cranial measurements. But the cranial measurements were meaningless in the end because in any given case, there are plenty of people with smaller brains who are smarter than people with larger ones. So the underlying premise was incorrect.

Cro Magnon had a substantially larger brain than modern humans. Just sayin'. Don't believe me? Look it up. Then show me the advanced pace program Cro Magnon developed.

So differences in the size of various regions of gray matter mean little.

Meanwhile, the division between liberal and conservative is contrived in the first place. It is idiotic that a woman would have to vote for someone who would take away her effectual right of self defense in order to secure her right to an abortion; just as it is idiotic that she would have to vote for someone who would start foreign wars on the most flimsy pretext in order to keep her taxes from increasing.

Furthermore, in actual practice of politics, liberals and conservatives may talk different talks, but they walk identical walks.

During the last republican administration when the republicans also controlled congress ... was planned parenthood defunded? no. NPR? no. Welfare? Nope -- it got bigger. Did government get smaller? Nope. Less expensive? Nope. Less intrusive? Nope. The conservative patter is just that -- patter. It is meaningless.

So here we have a study based upon a faulty premise of correlations that has a self-selection bias plus is based upon artificial correspondences to socially defined differences that, in the actual practice of politics, don't exist.


Actually, John brings up a good point. If we're talking about cranial capacity, then people with giantism would be smarter than Einstein. Below is a picture of a guy who had giantism, Paul Wight. He's better known as The Big Show in WWE. He's supposedly 7 feet 2 inches and 520 pounds. Obviously, his brain must be massive compared to most other people. Yet, he's not rewriting the book on quantum physics.

Brain size means next to nothing when it comes to abstract ideas like political beliefs. Hell, brain chemistry means next to nothing, for that matter.

What makes a bigger difference comes from familiar structures, and our perception of those structures. A lot of work has been done in this field in looking into Neuro-linguistic programming. What is NLP? What do you think Frank Luntz does for a living?

If you'd like to learn more about this topic, check out the link below. I'll give you the cliff notes version. Conservatives have a dominant male perspective, while liberals have a gender neutral nurturing perspective. It's the difference between the daddy-state and the mommy-state. Mommy keeps shit tidy, and worries about all the detail work, but she is kind of a pussy. Daddy is just there to keep all the scary shit out of the house. When he's not preoccupied with that, he gets drunk and beats the kids, while mommy cleans up after him.

-- Modified on 4/11/2011 9:11:18 PM

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