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I don't believe that.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11009379/from/ET/
Political bias affects brain activity, study finds
Democrats and Republicans both adept at ignoring facts, brain scans show
Updated: 6:46 p.m. ET Jan. 24, 2006
Democrats and Republicans alike are adept at making decisions without letting the facts get in the way, a new study shows.
And they get quite a rush from ignoring information that's contrary to their point of view.
Researchers asked staunch party members from both sides to evaluate information that threatened their preferred candidate prior to the 2004 Presidential election. The subjects' brains were monitored while they pondered.
The results were announced today.
"We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning," said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University. "What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts."
Bias on both sides
The test subjects on both sides of the political aisle reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted, Westen and his colleagues say.
Then, with their minds made up, brain activity ceased in the areas that deal with negative emotions such as disgust. But activity ed in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix, Westen explained.
The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making.
"None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged," Westen said. "Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones."
Notably absent were any increases in activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most associated with reasoning.
The tests involved pairs of statements by the candidates, President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry, that clearly contradicted each other. The test subjects were asked to consider and rate the discrepancy. Then they were presented with another statement that might explain away the contradiction. The scenario was repeated several times for each candidate.
A brain-scan technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, revealed a consistent pattern. Both Republicans and Democrats consistently denied obvious contradictions for their own candidate but detected contradictions in the opposing candidate.
"The result is that partisan beliefs are calcified, and the person can learn very little from new data," Westen said.
Other relatively neutral candidates were introduced into the mix, such as the actor Tom Hanks. Importantly, both the Democrats and Republicans reacted to the contradictions of these characters in the same manner.
The findings could prove useful beyond the campaign trail.
"Everyone from executives and judges to scientists and politicians may reason to emotionally biased judgments when they have a vested interest in how to interpret 'the facts,'" Westen said.
The researchers will present the findings Saturday at the Annual Conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.
© 2006 LiveScience.com. All rights reserved.
I don't believe that.
This forum is a prime example.
Just put a few smart dems with dumb repubs in the same room and it'll prove it.
This study must have been done by dimm-o-craps.
Nuh uh, it was the repugs.
All joking aside though, that's an interesting finding... I would have thought that it was the other way around (stupidity making you partisan).
It's long been obvious that the growth in popularity of "Pundit" programming in the news media has contributed to the dumbing down of the American public when it comes to politics, but this adds a physical element to the discussion.
Expand it beyond politics.
Any "world view", when thoroughly believed, is used to understand the world, explain damn near everything, ignore what doesn't fit the world view.
World views can be political, religious, philosophical, or any system of thought that attempts to explain the world.
And of course competing "world views" are very bloody. The more completely a group is programmed with a world view, the more extreme and reflexive and bloody the conflict when threatened by other groups and world views.
As above, the brain is wired to respond fight-or-flight in the face of threats against my in-group/tribe vs out-group/tribe.
As people spend their enire lives hypnotized by relativisitic, narrow-minded world views, they totally miss the question of what is The Absolute Truth of the Universe.
Vedanta/Hindu philosophy call the fake world "Maya", an illusion, that must be transcended before The Absolute Truth can be apprehended and lived. The major Eastern philosophies are much more advanced and sophisticated than Judaeo-Christian philosophy, and have been for several 1000 years.
Oo-rah!
If being a partisan makes you stupid, I wonder what being a non-partisan makes you? Most people have very low political IQs, at the very least, partisans take the time and interest to research one side of the story. The corporate-media sure isn't gonna give you the complete story because they have their own agenda, so sometimes getting at the truth takes some digging (or you can always come here). You remember when ABC, CBS, and NBC used to do hard-hitting stories about government waste and corruption when the Democrats were in power in the 70’s? Now what? John Stousell promoting a dead-head idea like school vouchers. Yeah, that's the liberal media I remember.
I think that is... you know... kind of the point.If being a partisan makes you stupid, I wonder what being a non-partisan makes you? Most people have very low political IQs, at the very least, partisans take the time and interest to research one side of the story. The corporate-media sure isn't gonna give you the complete story because they have their own agenda, so sometimes getting at the truth takes some digging (or you can always come here). You remember when ABC, CBS, and NBC used to do hard-hitting stories about government waste and corruption when the Democrats were in power in the 70’s? Now what? John Stousell promoting a dead-head idea like school vouchers. Yeah, that's the liberal media I remember.
oh, well. Touche' then.I think that is... you know... kind of the point.
the le of this thread should be changed to partisianship makes you stupid if you're a republican.
I've had many lovely partnerships with men.
They were not stuperid.
Maybe that's why so many people claim to be non-partisan. It's almost a shameful thing to be completely partisan, which, I would agree that it is. As for myself, I am not partisan, but I don't think that I could ever vote for a republican. Too many differences.
Eh, nobody is saying that if we put Democrats back in control everything will be alright, but anything the Demos do is still 10x's better than where the NeoCons in control of the government are taking us.
That is the only reason that I would vote for a Democrat.
You gotta remember that the NeoCons came into power under Clinton, not Dubya.
Politics is the ultimate spectator sport. Each party has their diehards or homers.
One party sucks Osama's the other doesn't....
USA Number 1 mother ers...
US Military beats your ing insurgent buddies ..
Sue me if you don't like it.
Now that .. is some ing politics.
Hey Vashie, we need little girls like you and me who wouldn't go and fight this war ourselves. We need your support and my administration is very greatful that you pretend like your tuff just like me, and by the way , we are very greatful.
Your doing a heck of a job Vashie
God Bless America
Last edited by George W Bush; 02-09-2006 at 11:32 AM.
Comparing Judeo-Christinan philosophies to Eastern spirituality is, I believe, very hard to do. Because the East (a term created by Europe being a central point on the globe) was isolated, for the most part, from a strong political force, namely the Roman Empire. It was able to take an almost scientific reverence of their belief systems whereas Christianity is replete with political reshaping because the power of God was a way of justifying a consolidation of power into one man.
For instance, Britain breaking with the Roman Catholic Church to form the Anglican Church simply because the Pope refused to recognize the divorce of Henry VIII from Catherine of Aragon, and transferring the power of the papacy to the head of the United Kingdom.
When most English-speaking children of God read his word, they are doing so from the King James version of the Bible, not in the orginal language in which it was written. The King James version is a mere 400 years old in a 2,000 year old faith. Our depictions of Jesus Christ are too far out of line with what he really would've looked like -- He was Jewish and living on the Arabian Penisula 2,000 years ago. He's much shorter and much darker than we imagine him. There's some good proof that Da Vinci's brother-in-law was the model for the Christ we think of today. This would be like thinking about Tom Hanks everytime someone talked about Malcom X.
As a Catholic, our religion is swayed too often by contemporary concerns to speak of total truth. We were cursed by geography.
This makes a lot of sense, and explains a lot of what we see in any political forum.
You thought of that all by yourself? Congratulations...
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