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Liberals and Conservatives Process Information Differently

Newspaper current event by ldsudduth on 11 September 2007, tagged as psychology

According to an article published in Nature Neuroscience, Liberals and Conservatives process information differently. The study, undertaken at UCLA and NYU, has found conservatives tend to be more persistent and structured in their judgments than their liberal counterparts. Liberals may also be more open to new experiences, and conservatives tend to block distracting information more effectively.

In the study, college student volunteers were asked to rank their politics and tested by being asked to press a keyboard when the letter M appeared and to not press the keyboard when the letter W appeared. The test was administered in reverse to a different set of participants and the results were identical. Liberals tended to be more accurate when they were not supposed to press the keyboard, while both camps were equally accurate when they were supposed to press the keyboard.

David Amodio, assistant professor of psychology at NYU and lead author of the study, cautions the study only tests a narrow range of human behavior, and one should not assume one political "leaning" was better than the other. He did, however, suggest it may identify one reason why the two camps do not get along.

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