Quote:
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.
"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."
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source and full article:
Political bias affects brain activity, study finds - LiveScience - MSNBC.com
Considering these findings, do you lose faith in the democratic progress? What could be done to make the voting public more reasonable? Do you see the "partisan effect" at work in volconvo debate forums?
- Personally I lose a little faith, but have hope...
- Politicians and public should be made aware of there findings and critical evidence based reasoning skills should be taught all schools.
- I see the partisan effect at work in some debates, eg in the relativism (philosophy and religion) debate our kind brother Patric Henry clings on to his own idea of relativism and accuses others of adhering to that pov, in spite of many demonstrations that the contrary is actually the case, ie they don't actually adhere to what he defines as relativism.