Ok, so not proof exactly, but man we are really smart. And I’m not talking about knowing geography or spelling or history. I’m talking about the alphabet. We know it, while conservatives are apparently blinded by ideology. In certain situations their rigid brains cannot distinguish among different letters of the alphabet, a major study has found, and this explains why they can’t tolerate ambiguity and conflict as well as liberals.
“Political orientation is related to how the brain processes information,” reports the UCLA and NYU study, as detailed in the LA Times:
Participants were college students whose politics ranged from “very liberal” to “very conservative. They were instructed to tap a keyboard when an M appeared on a computer monitor and to refrain from tapping when they saw a W.
M appeared four times more frequently than W, conditioning participants to press a key in knee-jerk fashion whenever they saw a letter.
And conservatives were by far the worst knee-jerkers, routinely mistaking a W for an M, or vice versa when the weightings were changed. This has happened before. Mole hill or WMD? Morass or winnable? Melting ice or wacko science? In all seriousness, Frank J. Sulloway, a researcher at UC Berkeley’s Institute of Personality and Social Research, told the Times that the results could explain why Bush demonstrated a single-minded commitment to the Iraq War and why “liberals could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas.”
This study is by no means the first to suggest that one political persuasion or another is more fit for duty in the battle of ideas. A few years ago I wrote about a University of Texas study that found residents of Houston suffer from a quasi-clinical condition known as “war fever.” But this newest study at least takes the political debate back to the ABCs. Now if only conservatives could go back to kindergarten. . .
