Test Measuring Ability To Type A Single Letter Conclusive Proves: Liberals Nuanced, Conservatives Stupid

One might think that true close-minded stupidity was being demonstrated by such a test and the ludicrous claims it makes based on something so trivial, but that's just the sort of stupidity I'd expect from you morons.

Participants were college students whose politics ranged from “very liberal” to “very conservative.” Scientists instructed them 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.

Each participant was wired to an electroencephalograph that recorded activity in their anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that detects conflicts between a habitual tendency (pressing a key) and a more appropriate response (not pressing the key). Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W, researchers said. Liberals and conservatives were equally accurate in recognizing M…

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Sulloway said the results could explain why President Bush demonstrates a single-minded commitment to the Iraq war and Sen. John F. Kerry, the liberal Massachusetts Democrat who opposed Bush in the 2004 presidential race, was accused of being a flip-flopper for changing his mind about the conflict.

Based on the results, he said, liberals could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas.

“There is ample data from the history of science showing that social and political liberals indeed do tend to support major revolutions in science,” said Sulloway, who has written about the history of science and has studied behavioral differences between conservatives and liberals.

I hope Allah forgives me from stealing almost all of his link, but I had to.

Exit question three (see Allah for first two): How, precisely, does following idiotic rules to perform a tedious test prove that one is in fact more highly mentally adaptable?

Exit question four: If the results came out the other way -- with liberals screwing up periodically, and conservatives slavishly following the simple-minded rules for the tedious, useless test, what do you suppose the odds are these researchers would have claimed that liberals inability to push keys proved in fact they were dreamers and more imaginative and more courageously free-thinking, and that conservatives were robotically efficient at performing such trivial repetitive tasks precisely due to the limitations of their troglodytic retard-brains?

posted by Ace at 10:48 PM

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