A study funded by the US government has concluded that conservatism can be explained psychologically as a set of neuroses rooted in "fear and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity".As it happens, the NIH is deeply relevant to my life, so I was able to examine a brief on the actual study, as published in Nature Neuroscience.As if that was not enough to get Republican blood boiling, the report's four authors linked Hitler, Mussolini, Ronald Reagan and the rightwing talkshow host, Rush Limbaugh, arguing they all suffered from the same affliction.
All of them "preached a return to an idealised past and condoned inequality".
"Behavioral reserach suggest that psychological differences between conservatives and liberals map onto the widely-studied self-regulatory process of conflict monitoring. Conflict monitoring is a general mechanism for detecting when one's habitual response tendency is mismatched with responses required by the current situation, [Emphasis mine] and this function has been associated with neurocognitive activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)."In essence, the study sought to tell whether a liberal mind was more likely to quickly adjust its habits in the face of new stimuli than a conservative mind. Of course, the assumption is that responses should change in the face of differing stimuli, and that there is no inherent value in continuing to say "yes" when the correct response is "no." (Or, perhaps, believing that Saddam had something to do with 9/11.)
Specifically, the subjects were conditioned to do something in response to a stimulus, and were required to forgo that action in response to a different stimulus. It was a study of inhibition in the face of habit. The results were that the liberal mind appears to be faster to change its habits in the face of new and different stimuli than the conservative mind.
"This association suggests that a more conservative orientation is related to greater persistence in habitual response pattern, despite signals that this response pattern should change."In short hand, a conservative mind is more likely to stay the course, even when presented with a cliff ahead.
The practical application of this study is that in times of change and upheaval, when the correct course of action may change from day to day, we are better off with liberal minds in charge, since they would be more likely to recognize that their standard response needs to change. One would imagine this could be relevant come November.
But that's just how I see it.
(Crossposted from Leesburg Tomorrow. With a tip-o-the-hat to loboforestal.)
Terrible and sad.
Conservatism is a tendency to continue doing what you're doing in face of evidence you shouldn't. It's not determinative. We all still have choices to make. It's just that for the conservative mind, it's a bit more difficult to go against habit than for a liberal mind.
Conservative GOVERNING principles are a problem (Katrina, Iraq, The Justice Department, etc. etc.) but conservative cognition is merely a set of tendencies.
Whether, in aggregate, conservatism is a sociological disease afflicting our country is another matter.