Political bias not subject to reason

[luke virtual kh]

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." ...

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.

[JohnMK]

I think we can generalize this further.

Humans like certainty, we like answers to our questions, especially those that don't require a thousand provisos and digressions -- so basically: simple, black and white answers. These are very comforting -- to be sure is to be self-confident, and self-confidence is dopaminergically rewarding. We build up some of our cognitive processes around whatever particular set of answers we have adopted (usually the black and white variety); one's intellectual framework can become hemmed in, in other words. We basically stop thinking as rationally as we could otherwise. Quick heuristics are adopted, they are like highly-gravitational black holes in the mind, unavoidable, leading to other black holes, cascading and recursing down to a conclusion that you wanted all along, one arrived at through such radical G-forces that to regard the conclusion as stillborn might actually be a useful heuristic. Escaping these (preconceived (il)logical pathways) can be extremely painful and difficult. When these are challenged, we experience uncomfortable emotions (such as fear and anger) that overwhelm reason; it can be very subtle and we might delude ourselves into thinking it's not happening at all, but objective science indicates that it does. We rotate the offending idea around in four dimensions to find the hole that we can ram our reptilian-limbic spear through. Kill the veracity of the idea, preserve our black and white answer, preserve our self-confidence, then Pavlov gives a bit of dopamine pleasure in the nucleus accumbens. Rinse, repeat, and enjoy.

Naturally this is all tendency. This cognitive style is so addictive though . . .

[JohnMK]

Related:

Start here:
07.22.2003 - Researchers help define what makes a political conservative

* Fear and aggression * Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity * Uncertainty avoidance * Need for cognitive closure * Terror management "From our perspective, these psychological factors are capable of contributing to the adoption of conservative ideological contents, either independently or in combination," the researchers wrote in an article, "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition," recently published in the American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin.

LOL here:
Jonah Goldberg on National Review Online

ME KONSERVATIVE, YOU MUCH SMART I know, I know, some who look positively on this study might say I'm just proving the researchers' conclusions. After all, the scientists in question performed "ten meta-analytic calculations" to come to their conclusions while conservatives like me spend most of the day opening and closing the refrigerator door applauding when the happy-fun light magically turns on.

End here:
http://www.psychoanalystsopposewar.o...n_Critique.pdf

In sum, we think that the motives elegantly integrated in Jost et al.’s (2003) model do not contribute specifically to political conservatism. Rather, from our point of view, they contribute to ideological rigidity and associated in-group favoritism, a syndrome that can be found readily among people around the world with right- or left-wing attitudes . . . < . . . > One could argue that in the United States and most other capitalist nations there are not many advocates of the extreme left or much in the way of a coherent left-wing ideology and that therefore, as the research reviewed by Jost et al. (2003) suggests, it may very well be the case that in such nations, on average, right-wingers are more ideologically extreme and rigid. People looking for an extreme, coherent, noncomplex, and rigid political ideology simply may not be as attracted to the left-wing in places like the United States. However, in other parts of the world, it is a different story. Given the once vast influence of the Soviet Union, and that even vaster current proponent of communism, China, we think it makes more sense when looking at the global picture to view the right-wing versus the left-wing as one dimension and ideologically rigid versus ideologically open as a second, quite independent dimension.

You there, Raúl M. Núñez Sheriff, Esq.? This might explain the premise underlying your epithetical ad hominem "critical-lefties."

[luke virtual kh]

Thankyou John, thankyou very much.

[Milton Bradley]

The whole concept is exponentially scarier when you finally come to terms with the fact that both of the major ideologies competing in this marketplace are false fronts for other agendas.

[Osborn F Enready]

Yes, I think it would be correct to say that "todays major parties" are no longer very concerned with maintaining an appearance to be "serving" the people. They generate bills and policy from their own party agenda, having little to do with public conscensus, desire or outright damnation.

They have a lock on the system, and once one party fails at trying to pass something, the other party picks up the ball and spins it another direction to attain its passage.

The citizens long ago took their eyes of the ball. Now every election they are swinging blinded by partisan propaganda and multi-layered political and commercial propaganda.

If they succeed at regulating the internet, free speech will all but have died.