Neuroscience: conservative brains and liberal brains work differently

A clear, simple experiment at New York University and UCLA demonstrates that conservatives quickly learn routine reactions to a stimulus, but that when the situation changes to make the routine reaction wrong, their brains do not function to override the learned routine easily. When the situation changes and makes the routine response wrong, liberals are 4.9 times more likely to show activity in the portions of the brain that deals with conflicting incoming data and 2.2 times more likely to get the correct answers.

The article published in the LA Times today went on to say:

Sulloway said the results could explain why President Bush demonstrated a single-minded commitment to the Iraq war and why some people perceived Sen. John F. Kerry, the liberal Massachusetts Democrat who opposed Bush in the 2004 presidential race, as 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.

Lead author David Amodio, an assistant professor of psychology at New York University, cautioned that the study looked at a narrow range of human behavior and that it would be a mistake to conclude that one political orientation was better. The tendency of conservatives to block distracting information could be a good thing depending on the situation, he said.

It appears to me that this study is demonstrating that conservatives are more oriented towards focusing on making routine processes more efficient, while liberals are more capable of quickly adapting to a changing environment.

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I suspect that this relates to the differences between Authoritarian personalities and non-authoritarian personalities. A person who is trying to focus on a specific task wants someone else to bring up the supplies, take away the results and prevent distractions from interfering with the task to be performed. This isn't just because it makes someone's job easier. It is a direct result of the limited nature of every human being, described by Herbert Simon's concept of Bounded Rationality.

A person with such attitudes belongs belongs deep inside an organization, and most organizations cannot function efficiently without such people. But there does have to be someone else who keeps track of those distractions which can interfere with the performance of individual tasks. Sometimes the entire set of tasks need to be stopped and replaced because no one wants the output. Failure to make changes like that are what killed the steam locomotive manufacturers. It took entirely new companies to produce diesel-electric locomotives. Someone has to recognize the need for changes and to implement the new ideas which might deal with those changes.

Consider reading John Dean's Conservatives without Conscience and Bob Altemeyer's The Authoritarians.

Also, an excellent measure of the distinction should be Tolerance for Ambiguity. Conservatives will have a low tolerance for ambiguity, while liberals will have a greater one. This research demonstrates the cognitive processes that lie behind the behavioral differences.