Re: Left-brained: Study suggests conservative Democrats don't compute for liberal voters

On 27 Nov 2021, Tritek <[email protected]> posted some
news:[email protected]: 

> Liberals are mentally ill.

Political partisans would like you to believe voters’ heads will explode 
if faced with candidates crossing party lines on key policies – a Democrat 
who opposes abortion, say, or a Republican who supports gun control.

In a new study, University of Nebraska-Lincoln researchers found that 
self-identified liberals were more likely to notice when candidates 
deviated from the party line. Liberals also tended to take longer to react 
to inconsistent positions from Democrats. And in the majority of 
instances, they evaluated those inconsistent positions as “bad.”

The study used a powerful functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging machine at 
the university’s Center for Brain, Biology and Behavior to observe what 
happens inside the brain when people are faced with “incongruent” policy 
positions from their party’s candidates. The researchers used the scanner 
to see if certain areas of the brain activate when people evaluate 
candidates’ stances on a range of issues.

Participants were asked to review made-up candidates’ positions on dozens 
of issues, then decide within milliseconds whether those positions were 
“good” or “bad.”

“We found that liberal and conservative participants processed the 
information differently and that liberals were more likely to penalize 
candidates who expressed incongruent positions,” said lead researcher 
Ingrid Haas, a political psychologist at Nebraska.

That may mean Democratic candidates with conservative leanings may have a 
trickier time in today’s political climate than Republican candidates with 
a liberal bent, Haas said.

The findings have implications for the causes of political gridlock, she 
said. It may not be true that polarization comes only from the top, with 
politically polarized elites alienating constituents by refusing to 
compromise. The study hints that polarization may also emerge at the 
grassroots level.

Despite conservatives’ reputation for being less tolerant of ambiguity, 
the findings suggest liberals are more likely to scrutinize inconsistency, 
Haas said.

“If less scrutiny is applied to Republicans for policy deviations, it may 
indicate that specific liberal causes and policies have some electoral 
viability among Republican candidates,” Haas and co-authors wrote in the 
study.

There are other possible explanations for the differences in conservative 
and liberal reactions: Perhaps the GOP has become so fractured on issues 
like health insurance, social issues and foreign policy, the researchers 
suggested, that voters don’t always recognize when a candidate has left 
the ideological fold.

Haas’ research team included Melissa Baker, a former Nebraska student and 
now a graduate student at the University of California at Merced; and 
Frank Gonzalez, a former Nebraska graduate student who is an assistant 
professor at the University of Arizona.

The Center for Brain, Biology and Behavior, or CB3, is an 
interdisciplinary center at Nebraska that brings together faculty in the 
social, biological and behavioral sciences and engineering. The center’s 
state-of-the-art facilities and multidisciplinary environment expands 
understanding of brain function and its effects on human behavior. The 
center’s unique capabilities and partnership with Nebraska Athletics 
deepen the university’s research capacity, including its leading expertise 
in concussion research.

The team conducted brain scans of 58 adults while they reviewed policy 
positions of four hypothetical political candidates – two Democrats and 
two Republicans. While in the scanner, participants saw stock photos 
representing the candidates and responded to about 50 of their policy 
positions on issues such as the death penalty, teaching evolution, 
immigration, same-sex marriage, climate change and gun control.

About one-third of the time, the hypothetical candidates held positions 
that conflicted with their party’s. Participants pressed a button to 
indicate whether they felt “good” or “bad” about the candidate based on 
the policy stance.

Conservatives were less likely to notice whether policy positions followed 
party lines. They also showed a stronger positive response when Democrats 
held conservative positions. They were more evenly divided in ruling 
whether it was good or bad when a candidate deviated from the party 
platform.

Researchers found that the areas of the brain used to monitor conflict and 
evaluate information were more active on incongruent trials for liberal 
participants compared to conservative participants, especially when they 
evaluated “in-group,” or same-party, candidates.

“These findings may be concerning to those who see political polarization 
as a problem as well as to those who desire meaningful social change as 
they demonstrate the psychological process that help to hinder the 
likelihood of political compromise, which is necessary for translating 
desired policy into implemented policy given the divided nature of 
government in the United States,” the authors concluded.

The study was published online in the journal Social Justice Research.

<https://news.unl.edu/newsrooms/today/article/left-brained-study-suggests-
conservative-democrats-dont-compute-for-liberal/>