The subtitle of this piece is misleading. The study was rigged to make conservatives look maladaptive, not stupid. I wish the researchers had cut to the chase and administered IQ tests to the subjects and finally confirmed what we have all so long suspected. In John Stuart Mill's words, “Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative.”

even in his day. Do you think things possibly could have changed in over 200 years?

Well yeah exactly. Though I do disagree with you on the relative intelligence of liberals and conservatives, you did hit the nail on the head - the study didn't have anything to do with that. It didn't even have anythign to do with "adaptability" in a sense that matters to people. (As I posted elsewhere, there's not much demand for human Von Neumann Algorithms.)

A study that really tested this would be much more, well, human. A good example would be that famous controversial prison study where the guards turned into psychopaths. That was interesting because although it was also artificial in a lot of ways, the correlation with real life was obvious. My idea would be to run a game-playing test like cog scientists do all the time. You'd be playing some betting game with another person, but toward the end of a long game, the other person would suddenly switch strategy. Who reacts better, liberals or conservatives? It would still be artificial etc., but at least it would appear to correlate with something interesting and useful.

Oh and there was one basic way in which it was "rigged" - apparently and unsuprisingly, they found 40-odd "liberals" among randomly selected UCLA students, and 6 or 7 "conservatives." The numbers are insufficent to make the case even for this weird von-Neumann test. (Also, apparently they used electrodes to measure response but didn't bother to record the skull characteristics of their subjects, which is standard practice to let you control-out the ones with abnormally shaped heads, which affect the measurement. This would probably lead any other *TINY* study like this to be rejected out-of-hand by respected journals. The journals exhibited the famous "selection bias" and ran the study anyway because, reading the abstract (that's probably all the "reviewers" did) it seemed to confirm their own prejudices.)

a) Nature Neuroscience is one of the best journals in the field. I guarantee that the methods of this study were put through the ringer before it was published.

b) You don't typically measure skull characteristics when you are doing ERP, which was the method used in the paper. The 10/20 system of electrode placement means the relative distances matter, not absolute measures.

c) I totally agree that the sample size was off to make a statement with this kid of gravity. While it is large enough to get significance you do want a more random sample from the full population - perhaps form several urban and rural areas - to be more conclusive.

BigToe:

The subtitle of this piece is misleading. The study was rigged to make conservatives look maladaptive, not stupid. I wish the researchers had cut to the chase and administered IQ tests to the subjects and finally confirmed what we have all so long suspected. In John Stuart Mill's words, “Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative.”

Oh, you mean like Brittany Spears and Lindsay Lohan?

There's some brain power on the left, all right!

LOL!

uh....Britney Spears is a registered Republican

DTaggart:

uh....Britney Spears is a registered Republican

So is Arlan Specter. So what?

I agree. So how could such a high impact journal accept a study with such a terrible sample that the conclusions could not be significantly supported by the data? Nothing about the experiment in terms of the methodology defined anything new, no new mechanisms of adaptation or cognition were developed, and the conclusions certainly cannot be supported by the sample size (whose cohorts are the only "new" thing this study could even claim)?

I find it rather disappointing when I can read a better, more rigorous article about cognitive neuroscience in Neuroimage than in Nature Neuroscience.

Don't get me wrong though, many of the papers in Nature Neuroscience are quite good. Even in the same issue, a great article about rhomboid signaling activating ERK and EGFR (and its relationship to sleep regulation) exists. I'm just wondering how this ERP study could've passed through.