this here is complete horseshit. and the idea that there is a difference in the political psychologies of left and right has even gone brain. notice the irresistable undertow of self-praise that accompanies these notions: that conservatives have a bigger irrational-fear zone, or that liberals are more open to experience. i want you to feel good about yourself, but i'd suggest therapy rather than "science." the academic left is absolutely unanimous and each person believes what she believes for reasons of social cohesion. actually open-minded people questing for new experiences would not chant the same litttle cliches in unison. really this is the most pitiful way imaginable to defend your political positions: it would be irrelevant to the truth of the positions even if it were true, which it isn't. put em in a scanner and the self-deception lobe lights up like hong kong at night.
if a white scientist tells you that white craniums are bigger, or if a man tells you that men have a bigger reasoning facility and women a bigger emotional region, you should just ignore it and let it blow over. the american academic leftist is achingly desperate to belong epistemically and yet is a monster of hubris. that anyone could possibly disagree with themselves is a bizarre fact that needs some sort of explanation, and there can be only one: our opponents are cognitively defective. they might as well just scream 'tard!' and have done. if you are making grants for this kind of 'research,' stop right now. at an absolute minimum, if you are going to do any sort of research on 'political psychology,' you need to make sure the researchers are politically diverse. the fact that that would basically not be possible with american academic psychologists shows precisely how open-minded they are.
no doubt everyone sort of entertains the notion that disagreement with themselves is a pathology. like i assert that there's something defective about people who think lou reed made good records. say i proposed to show that with empirical studies, scientifically...
the idea that there are brain differences between liberals and conservatives is frigging pathetic, and it shows why it matters what you know when you start: dude the left-right political spectrum was invented at very earliest in the french revolution. it had no purchase in american politics until the late 19th century. there have been many other ways of conceiving the political spectrum. it is a textbook case of the sort of problems i outline below: we're going to imprint momentary cultural fads or mistakes into your very biology. people's political positions correlate to things like income levels, state or region of residence, gender, race, sexual identity, and so on: so you'd better be willing to connect all of these with brain configuration. now we're really, really in interesting territory, the territory that begins to show that the researchers are actually reactionaries, which they could prove by self-dissection, which would also do the world and human knowledge a favor. i'm going to put it like this: until you can do something less self-serving and less historically ignorant, until you can actually show some openness to new ideas or experiences, i'm not even going to look at the 'data.' really if someone's paying me i'll try to smash the methodology. (well, it's psychology; the methodology comes pre-smashed.) but there's no more need for that than there is to sift through the pile of shit bit by bit to account for the stench. that there is a pile of shit there is evident from the smell, and we don't need to do the chemical analysis.
