There’s two somewhat related posts worth reading this evening. Neurophilosophy reviews a study from Nature Neuroscience which suggests there might be a cognitive explanation for the differences in how conservatives and liberals think.
Research suggests that liberals and conservatives have different personality traits and “cognitive styles”: while liberals
The Denialism Blog notes that “one common tactic one sees from denialists is whole-hog cut-and-paste rebuttals without attribution. For instance, on finds when arguing with evolution denialists that they’ll just cut-and-paste tired creationist arguments into comment threads.” They find similarities between the global warming deniers and creationists:
We wrote briefly about the latest attempt by global warming denialists to suggest that the scientific consensus does not support climate change. To start with, it was little more than a repeat of the previous debunked attempts, and was hardly original.
Well, for more proof they can’t think originally, write originally, or do anything other than rehash debunked arguments, check out Lambert’s coverage of Shulte’s reply to criticism that he’s engaging in more typical denialist nonsense. It’s a cut-and-paste job from Monckton without attribution! Not only is it total nonsense – nearly every citation is miscategorized or misrepresented – but it’s almost word-for-word lifted from another global warming hack’s writing, without attribution or citation.
So continuing the long tradition of hack responses to criticism, the latest global warming denialist nonsense looks just like the same nonsense that was debunked in years past, and just like the kind of nonsense one sees from creationists.
Update: The Los Angeles Times is now reporting on the “left wing brain” versus the “right wing brain.” They add this analysis of the findings:
Frank J. Sulloway, a researcher at UC Berkeley’s Institute of Personality and Social Research who was not connected to the study, said the results “provided an elegant demonstration that individual differences on a conservative-liberal dimension are strongly related to brain activity.”
Analyzing the data, Sulloway said liberals were 4.9 times as likely as conservatives to show activity in the brain circuits that deal with conflicts, and 2.2 times as likely to score in the top half of the distribution for accuracy.
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.
This might apply to conservative denial of the science of evolution and climate change, but there are other factors involved.The statement on John Kerry requires some correction. Kerry opposed going into Iraq unless it was proven we were threatened by WMD. As there was no such evidence, he did object to the war prior to the start of the war so there was not any significant difference between his pre-war beliefs and his opposition to the war during the 2004 campaign. The real difference is that liberals were less likely to have a problem with a nuanced position of supporting going to war under certain circumstances, such as if we were threatened by WMD, and opposing the war when the threat described by the Bush administration was not found to be valid. In contrast, once conservatives decided upon war they were less likely to change their views based upon the facts.
