I was very disappointed after reading the article because I expected a well-reasoned psychological argument as to why Amodio et al. was incorrect. Instead, much of the article was hand-waving and weak arguments against standard methods in cognitive psych. I wanted to do a quick point-by-point of the article with my own thoughts on it at the end.

1. Habitual Ways of Thinking. Fifteen minutes IS a habit in terms of how you are completing the task at hand. Studies have been done studying single neurons which show that some actions can become routine in as few as 5 trials (Pasupathy and Miller, 2001). Further, tapping a keyboard is a 'way of thinking' if a key response is a critical part of the decision making process.

2. Responsiveness to Information. The time constraints on the response are there for a reason. If the researchers gave the subjects too much time to respond then it would be impossible to measure levels of cognitive control at the onset of a stimulus. By making the subjects respond very quickly you are able to measure how they deal with conflicting information.

3. Complexity and Ambiguity. My sense is that Amodio talks about complexity and ambiguity not as words describing the results of the study, but about the information processing ability of these people in general. While there is some evidence to support this idea, I think in the context of the paper (political affiliation) this was a bit too far. This was the point that got them the press though, which is probably why is was included.

4. Maladaptiveness. The Botvinick et al. (2001) was a landmark piece on cognitive control and conflict monitoring. The idea that its definition is at odds with the one from the Amodio work is incorrect. They are both describing a system that keeps an eye out for any bit of information that would require modification of a prepotent response. Also, extra conflict monitoring sensitivity has been shown to be adaptive across a wide range of studies. This has been demonstrated developmentally (Casey et al., 1997) and in clinical disorders like OCD (Roth et al, 2007) to name two groups.

So, don't get me wrong on the above points. I am not a big fan of the study. I believe that their population sample was not truly random and that to say anything robust about liberals/conservatives you would need to sample from urban and rural areas across the whole country. A quick power analysis also indicates that they should probably have 50 people per group for a modest effect size with a standard t-test - though ERP studies tend to have their own funny methods. I have other issues with the study as well, but I think you get my point.

The Amodio paper isn't a great example of scientific progress. There may very well be differences between liberals and conservatives, but studies with more powerful designs are needed. Finally, if studies like this are to be assailed they should be criticized on their weak points, not on their premise.

Nice to have a reasoned response, although I suspect any argument with a conservative entrenches them further, facts be damned (or altered, or carefully selected). I highly recommend the link to the "damning study"--Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition (thanks Mr. Saletan). Interesting stuff, and helps me to explain and have more empathy for the more conservative members of my extended family and coworkers. Were our country to swing further towards an authoritarian regime, there will always be a segment of the society who will be comfortable with the structure and social conformity.

It's not really the study that matters, but the way it was used. The study could have been factually reported as something like "Liberals do better than conservatives at split-second button pressing task". But that wouldn't have been very interesting. So, depending on your point of view, you could spin the results as "Liberals faster thinkers than conservatives" or "Liberals good at reaching hasty conclusions".

There is article in the Wall Street Journal today (page B1) that says that most scientific studies are tainted by sloppy analysis. This is apparently because researchers want to come up with something new and different. "Overeager researchers often tinker too much with the statistical variables of their analysis to coax any meaningful insight from their data sets." Perhaps that is what is going on here.

Kevin Clark

"Further, tapping a keyboard is a 'way of thinking' if a key response is a critical part of the decision making process."

You cannot compare the part of the brain that deals with complex moral issues with finger tapping.

They aren't even from the same part of the brain.

If you were part of the neuroscience field, you would have known this.

Since you didn't, I call any qualification you have for making such assertions into question.

KevClark64:

It's not really the study that matters, but the way it was used. The study could have been factually reported as something like "Liberals do better than conservatives at split-second button pressing task".

Kevin Clark

Since Saletan spends a fair chunk of time directly criticizing the study's methods, prefrontal's comments are spot on. These are standard methods in cog psych, psycholinguistics, etc. It's embarrassing for Saletan (slate's science 'expert') to dismiss them in such an offhand fashion.

Thanks, prefrontal, for chiming in. It's really helpful when actual scientists contribute to discussions of science.

Oh, and don't bother replying to San... you'll just get 100 responses about how dumb you are... he does it in every forum.

"It's embarrassing for Saletan (slate's science 'expert') to dismiss them in such an offhand fashion."

The only embarassment is people like you trying to claim that those are "methods" and justifiying the poor results that come from it.

Furthermore, the fact that the test subjects are all college students from liberally dominated areas is some how representative is absolutely pathetic.

Neuroscientists measure chemicals. This isn't neuroscience. This isn't even psych. This was a politically aligned person who wanted to bash the competition.

Thanks bugger. I have been reading Slate for years but never made an account for the discussion boards until I read this article.

Amodio is a good scientist. I had dinner with him once while at a social psychology symposium - he is a really good guy. The issue I have with his article is the same issue I have with his field. That is, there are limits regarding how far you can generalize your findings. I am a developmental cognitive neuroscientist, so I tend to make statements limited to certain age ranges. Amodio is in the field of social neuroscience, meaning he tries to generalize his findings to all of social behavior. Many folks have issues with this, like KevClark64, saying that going from reaction times to higher-order social interactions is a reach. I tend to agree, but it is a large and growing field.

Be interesting to see if prefrontal responds. Not only is the study testing something irrelevant, but there seem to have been only 7 or 8 conservatives in the whole sample. And there were definitely only 43 students total. Besides - wtf were they doing testing the political inclinations of students at UCLA? Obviously if they could find any conservative students dumb enough to go to UCLA and get abused every single waking minute, they're going to have some other cognitive defects. Why on earth didn't this study pull from the general population?

p.s. The answer is that it would have been more expensive, and these were idealogues on a budget!

"By making the subjects respond very quickly you are able to measure how they deal with conflicting information."

Well, you are able to measure how they deal with conflicting information when made to respond very quickly. Much of a person's thought and problem-solving, particularly as to the larger social issues that divide liberals and conservatives, does not take place on this time scale. Maybe the results are generalizable from instant-response situations up to more reflective situations, but I don't think that's apparent from this study.

Hyperionred: you are absolutely right about the sample. If you are going to make broad statements about the population you have to sample randomly from the whole population. You should also have roughly the same number of people in the two groups you are studying so your estimate of the variability is of the same quality. The Amodio paper did not do well on either account.

Tom: I also agree. The paper did not do an effective job of linking the instantaneous need for cognitive control to higher-order decision making processes. I lay part of the blame at the feet of Nature Neuroscience, who limits the length of brief reports to something like 500 words. Nothing like an incredible, press-release-worthy paper that is shorter than some comments here on the Fray. Beyond that, the rest would have been up to Amodio et al. to make the argument, which would have been a difficult position to defend.

Prefrontal, great original post.

I just read the article with a neuroscience friend of mine for kicks and for insight. There are not 7-8 conservatives as several posters have stated, nor are their two groups analyzed here. Rather it is a correlation analysis with all participants self-rating themselves on a liberal-conservative spectrum.

Thanks. And thanks more generally for writing about this. It's great to have knowledgeable context from someone in the field.

The point about the word limit is important, but so is the fact that subtleties and caveats are lost when the scientific paper or letter gets picked up by the popular (and even science-specific popular) press. I've had this experience where a scientific letter I and a coauthor published was picked up by a (relatively) popular scientific magazine. Because I was not as careful as a I should have been in making sure the magazine's reporter got all the details correct, there were a few mistakes in the magizine article. By the time that summaries of that article appeared on several web sites, the interpretations of interpretations of the work made it sound more advanced than it really was.

Although I've only read the Saletan piece, it sounds as though a study designed to try to determine a correlation between political leaning and the level of activity in the part of the brain responsible for conflict resolution has been characterized as poor brain function = conservative. As such, Saletan appears to be critiquing the interpretation of the letter rather than the letter itself.

prefrontal -- Thanks for your comments. You make very good points about places where I should have done better. As a non-expert, I often make mistakes, so I really appreciate having wiser heads around. One thing I want this forum to be is a place where topics I've covered in long or short form continue to be discussed, clarified, corrected, etc., for the continuing education of everybody, including me. I wish I'd clarified that 1) the methods I'm criticizing are standard in the field and 2) it's not really the methods I'm objecting to, but the characterizations drawn from them. I do think it's important to hold scientists and their institutions accountable for their own characterizations, and not to let them pass these off purely as exaggerations by the press. In this case, I think the evidence shows it was a team effort.

Your formulations are more precise than mine, so I'll just highlight them, since they convey the essential problems:

1) "there are limits regarding how far you can generalize your findings."

2) "going from reaction times to higher-order social interactions is a reach."

3) "The paper did not do an effective job of linking the instantaneous need for cognitive control to higher-order decision making processes."

Re CM, adaptiveness, and OCD, what do you think of this point from the Neurocritic site? (<link>)

Liberals showed larger ERN waves than conservatives when mistakenly responding on No-Go trials. However, so do individuals with clinical diagnoses such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (Gehring et al., 2000) or major depressive disorder (Chiu & Deldin, 2007). On the other hand, individuals with schizophrenia (Mathalon et al., 2002) or psychopathy (Munro et al., 2007) show smaller ERN waves than control participants. These findings extend to the normal population, i.e., people who do not fit the criteria for a clinical diagnosis, but who score higher or lower on certain traits. For example, people who score high on negative affect have bigger ERNs (Hajcak et al., 2004), while individuals with "externalizing psychopathology"1 have smaller ERNs (Hall et al., 2007). Does this mean that liberals are neurotic and conservatives are antisocial?

I'm not sure why hyperionred seems to think that only liberals attend UCLA. Admission to any of the University of California campuses (including that liberal haven UC Berkeley) is ultra competitive (straight A's in all advanced courses in high school and awesome SAT scores may not be enough to get you into UC Berkeley, UCLA, or UC Santa Barbara). So it's not lilke conservatives are shunning UCLA when it is such an achievement to get into a UC school. Perhaps a better critique would be that the UC system is full of hyper-competitive students and that combined with the scoring aspect of the tests may skew the results. But testing students is really the only practical option for an academic psych study.

However, I don't believe the study's authors were implying that the conservative propensity for errors in instantaneous conflict resolution is a "cognitive defect". The brain is a complex instrument in which many different areas of the brain contribute to an overall interpretation of a sensory input. This study appears to be investigating one particular area of the brain and, therefore, cannot make any particular conclusions about cognitive function as a whole.

The furthest I would stretch the study results would be to say that the results imply that there is a biological basis for some people to have their knee-jerk reactions be more conservative. What other areas of the brain do to modify or reinforce that knee-jerk reaction is not examined.

I think it would be interesting to compare liberal and conservatives in terms of how other parts of the brain process the information from this conflict resolution area of the brain. Do conservatives tend to have less activity in the conflict resolution area but use other portions of the brain to identify deviations from patterns that get through? Do liberals have more active conflict resolution areas and use other portions of the brain to identify items that belong to patterns which the conflict resolution area noted as a conflict? Perhaps part of the answer is in conservative errors of commision vs liberal errors of omission. And more importantly, how does the brain utilize the information coming from the conflict resolution center - do they trump or defer to the conflict resolution center?