Posted on 01/25/2006 6:02:15 PM PST by Amerigomag
Democrats and Republicans alike are adept at making decisions without letting the facts get in the way. And they get quite a rush from ignoring information that's contrary to their point of view.
Researchers asked staunch party members from both sides to evaluate information that threatened their preferred candidate prior to the 2004 Presidential election. The subjects' brains were monitored while they pondered. The results were announced today.
"We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning," said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University. "What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts."
The test subjects on both sides of the political aisle reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted, Westen and his colleagues say. Then, with their minds made up, brain activity ceased in the areas that deal with negative emotions such as disgust. But activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix.
The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making.
"None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged," Westen said. "Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones." Notably absent were any increases in activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most associated with reasoning.
The brain imaging revealed a consistent pattern. Both Republicans and Democrats consistently denied obvious contradictions for their own candidate but detected contradictions in the opposing candidate. "The result is that partisan beliefs are calcified, and the person can learn very little from new data," Westen said.
Same with conservative "non-partsians". You know, the ones who voted for Perot out of conviction and ended up electing Clinton.
The "facts" in this article are very vague -- but the conclusion (that both Republicans and Democrats base their political decisions on knee-jerk emotional reactions rather than logical thought) seems to go against the general trends which I have observed in my life.
These "researchers" were just trying to bolster their belief that "extremes on either side are wrong" -- missing the point entirely that there may be some objective truth and factual absolutes in play.
Just because Einstein proved the visual world was relative, doesn't mean that the world of concepts or ideas is.
This is a triplicate post.
I've asked the mods to pull it.
Facts like beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
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