Perhaps if the "liberals" and the "conservatives" could quit arguing about who is smarter, who is more intelligent, who has the bleeding heart and who is the war mongerer, and actually WORK TOGETHER to find common ground and to actually find some solutions to our various issues... perhaps then we'd all actually get something done and the world would be better for it.

Try Independence America! You may like it!

Theory of a Stupid Conservative:

I hypothesize inferior intelligence is associated with the organization or group who ended up paying for this study. I would also postulate any liberal who buys into this asinine diatribe is even lower intelligence than the organization who commissioned the study. This is so stupid, I have to question my own intelligence for responding. Therefore I am conservative.

getajob

This entire situation is ridiculous. We are all the same, regardless of political orientation.

Both the experiment and article have flaws that show how circumstantial this entire thing is.

Liberals aren't smarter, conservatives aren't smarter. Who's to decide what "smart" is anyways? Who's smarter, the genius that has no social skills or the actor that makes millions?

We're all humans and lets accept that.

I think that Slate should change their name to Slant. Come on! Maybe Slant should publish a conservative study which shows that conservatives are more successful. Its would certainly be more believable. How about doing a little research about the validity of what you print. If you read the heading of the article you would think that it is supporting the belief, which is the intent, read further, then you understand the real information, The study is crap. oh well shouldnt expect more from Slant.

I believe that basing a complete study of political intellegence over a skill set that can be honed playing video games is makes about as much sense as claming just because the some one obviously has a different politcal slant, they are wrong, without addressing the arguments or facts themselves.

It's surprising that commentaries have seemed to accept the authors' assumption that political beliefs, and thus thinking, are essentially static. That is, the same person who is conservative today couldn't become liberal or radical tomorrow. Anyone familiar with what happens in popular thinking during political crises would recognize the fallacy of this, how fluid people's thinking can be. While there are quite a few historical studies that touch on this phenomen - some about the Russian Revolution come to mind right off - one really need look no further than the shifts in popular thinking among Iraqis in during the current Anglo-American occupation of their country. People who welcomed the US and expected it to lead the way in creating some kind of democracy now support attacks on American soldiers, if not participating in them themselves. Another classic case is that of house servants, who in normal times are usually much more conservative than their "field" brethren, but when the situation changes turn into some of the most militant. Then, of course, given the right circumstances some conservatives can become awfully friendly with fascists, to wit parts of the middle and working classes during the Nazi period in Germany (and upper class Americans and Brits who supported Hitler).

I haven't seen it mentioned that there is a long-standing literature that posits that conservatives are less open to new ideas and, in fact, are less psychologically developed or mature. I haven't been around the field for awhile, but Kohlberg and Maslow and maybe Erik Erikson come to mind (also much of the post-WWII communism=fascism crowd). The commenter who noted the self-serving nature of many studies done by liberal academics is spot on (btw, not all academics are liberals by any means, even in the social scienes - just look at psycho- and socio-biological research). And this is also another case where using hardly formed adolescent and young adult students as subjects is inappropriate to the issues being examined.

That said, I do think there is an important grain of truth to the notion that conservative thinking (political, social, etc.) differs from liberal (or more than liberal). It's true by definition - conservatives conserve and thus are more prone to do so at any moment. But people do change, as do the circumstances in which they live, which is why trying to correlate political orientations with the way brains work neurologically is fundamentally poor science.

OTOH, the irony is, if you think about it, that the underlying implication of the study is darn reactionary. As in 1984 reactionary, i.e., providing research findings that allow rulers to better know how to control, repress and eliminate individuals and populations.