Browsing around before going to bed I happened apon an artical linked on my MSN homepage regarding blah blah blah study on conservatives and liberals.

This "study", if it so deams to be called so, was a load of bunk, plain and simple. The writer made a very persuasive argument, though his opinion was obviously biased (use of lanugage in such a way to demean liberalism as a whole). This is the reason liberals are looked down apon in american society today, atempting to debate the intelegence of individual groups of people is rediculous. Does this "study" deserve to be discredited? Completely... Do the liberals who did the "study" need to reasess themselves? Again, yes... Does this represent all liberals? No...

Simply stated, too many posts on this site are trying to make liberals look absolutely aweful because of a "study". Don't think I'm trying to defend this load of bunk for "the sake of liberalism", I would be pretty steamed if I saw a study similar to this one saying all liberals are maladaptive and stupid.

It's little things like this that cause a personal disdain for politics in general. "Oh my god some liberals made a study saying conservatives are stupid, let us retaliate by bashing all liberals all over this site" Please...

These "evil" liberals are discracing our names... So what do the conservatives do... stat bashing liberals... It's kindergarten all over again, everybody is bickering and fussing with nothing vastly intelegable to say. I remember when my father always told me, "If you don't have something nice to say about someone, don't say anything at all."

So what if I (ME) believe something different than you? I would fight for your right to your opinion. I won't try to force mine on you either (good luck finding that in very many political people, liberal or conservative... as we all know, it's either you believe what I say or you're wrong and I'm going to educate you, we all know it's true) so please, don't try to force me to believe all liberals are evil and coniving... most are... but so are most conservatives. To say that one party is more intelegent than another is akin to trying to force someone to believe that politics is a sport of saints.

It's politics people, quit being so hostile and closed minded to eachother (both liberals and conservatives), maybe we can have something we both agree on. Overzealousness runs rampant in every word having to do with politics and any form of seperation. We all want everyone else to belive what we say, but trying to warp the words of some misguided "scientist" to create an image for an entire group is wrong.

I believe in opinion...
I believe in rights...
I am not evil...
I am not a conservative...
I am not a liberal...
I am not you...

Free will and opinion are the tools to create a wonderful conversation, or blatant hostility spanning generations. If you use them, use them wisely.

By the way, and this is practicly suicide, because nobody wants to listen to an ignorant kid, I am 17 years old... It's wonderful demanding more civility than adults...

Guessed responses:
"You can't have an opinion til you're old enough to vote."
"You're a teenager, teenagers are ignorant but think they know everything."
"You're bashing conservatives"
"You're bashing liberals"
ect...

Thank you for your time, and I look forward to some good opinions for or against my argument, have fun with it.

On the real, you're exactly right... The study was BS with too many flaws to even get into... But the bigger story are the reactions...LOL... Like I said in my post, I can't even take this study serious so I poked fun at it... Simply put, the thought of comparing "button-pushing" to well-informed decision making should have lost this professor his research grant...LOL...

Good read.

The study, per se, was not flawed. The reasons this is so have been listed - by professional research psychologists - several times (though you'd have to scroll back a LOT of pages to find them). The conclusions reached in the original study, likewise, were valid enough, though the point of conducting a scientific study to demonstrate that conservatives tend to be more conservative and liberals tend to be more liberal escapes me. The way the press twisted those conclusions was, indeed, flawed, and the way the article's author twisted them still further - evidently, without even bothering to read the original study or its findings before publishing - was downright depressing. True to form, most of the posters here responding to the article - and each others' posts - have continued the twisting until what is being discussed bears little if any resemblence to the actual study or its conclusions.

One more time... the study did not address, even implicitly, the relative intelligence, morality or sanity of liberals and conservatives. Neither did it address the relative merits of their respective political world views.It merely demonstrated that the apparent tendency of conservatives to repeat familiar patterns regardless of new information was, in fact, reproducable under laboratory conditions and appeared to be hardwired into their cognitive processes at a very low level (extending way beyond much higher-level processes such as political opinions). The only implication the researches themselves appear to have drawn from this is that political liberalism and conservatism may be more the result of very real differences in the way people's brains are wired than the result of conscious deliberation and choice... an implication that is certainly supported by their, admittedly somewhat limited, preliminary study.

The study does not address which world view is "right". It does not address the intelligence of those who hold the disparate world views, nor does it address their moral righteousness. The ONLY thing it addressed was the psychological level at which the differences between liberals' and conservatives' patterns of cognitive reaction emerge. Those who insist upon reading more into it than that and using it as an excuse to launch into name-calling diatribes against whichever group they themselves do not identify with (including the author of the Slate article) should probably examine their reasons for wanting so desperately to pick a fight with their political opposition in this forum. As for those who know better but insist upon egging them on... trolls have existed since the earliest (pre-web) days of online message boards. They are universally despised, and were generally quickly banned from any any BBS they graced with their presence before the world wide web became so ubiquitous. It would, of course, be a waste of time to tell you to go away and stop stirring up trouble, but it might be helpful to those who are relatively new to the net and unaware of your presence, to recognize you for who you are. People who stir up fights between other people so they can amuse themselves by sitting back on the sidelines watching the sparks fly are sociopathic and vile.

LWetzel:

GAY -LODGE, stop talking to yourself. I mean yourselves.

Now you're insulting the people who remain neutral in the study? He's not redeeming the study nor condemning it. The moment he stated that the results of the study were low-level and possibly inconclusive you call him gay? Does that mean that you're only participating in this forum because you want to see conservatives demeaned? That's insulting and amazingly dim.

BSeitz:

LWetzel:

GAY -LODGE, stop talking to yourself. I mean yourselves.

Now you're insulting the people who remain neutral in the study? He's not redeeming the study nor condemning it. The moment he stated that the results of the study were low-level and possibly inconclusive you call him gay? Does that mean that you're only participating in this forum because you want to see conservatives demeaned? That's insulting and amazingly dim.

I appreciate the thought, BSeitz, but defending me only encourages attackers like that.

Please don't feed the trolls... <g>

Lostandconfused,

You make some very good points about tolerance and civility. As a conservative, I think liberals have some really great ideas that I wish conservative politicians would embrace, rather than shooting down because it is a 'liberal' idea.

There are many reasons why people who consider themselves liberal may do better on this test. For example, another poster pointed out the possibility that maybe liberals do better because they spend more time playing video games. In my experience in college, students in easier majors who had more time to play video games did tend to be more left leaning than students in harder majors who studied all the time. Another poster pointed out that since political views tend to get more conservative with time, maybe the conservatives in this test were on average a few years older than the liberals, which greatly affects response times. Knowing this, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that liberals would do better on a test where quick response times give one an edge.

I find it hard to believe that such a flawed study would make it to a major peer reviewed journal if it had concluded that conservatives did better. Since liberal politicians tend to fund colleges and research more, the journal editors would be less inclined to bite the hand that feeds them. Also, since psychologists, tend to be left leaning, they would also be more inclined to design a test where liberals would do 'better'. That is what is being condemed here.