If they did this test on the Berkeley campus they would have had a hard time finding conservatives. That in itself could skew the results.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=kBVmfIUR1DA

Liberals are also more likely to stand and let themselves be murdered by a crazed gunman.

Ortzinator on September 10, 2007 at 11:18 AM

Precisely my point.

Dr. Charles G. Waugh on September 9, 2007 at 11:55 PM

First the research that men prefer hot chicks to ugly and now this study. Couldn’t this money go to something worthwhile like a bridge in Alaska? Oh that’s right, that’s already funded.

How about a study on the effectiveness of a border fence?

So far people not related to the study have said that Liberals were more likely to be right than Conservatives.

However, the small amount of data I could find showed that liberals and conservatives did equally well with identifying the letter that appeared 4X more. Liberals did better at identifying the letter that appeared less (Conservatives were wrong 47% of the time and liberals were wrong 37% of the time).

One bit of data that I haven’t been able to find is if they were both averaging the same response times. I’ve seen similar studies and one of their requirements is that people respond very quickly. It’s supposed to be an instinctive reaction when you press the button. I’d be interested to know if the liberal respondents were taking longer to press the keys. If that’s the case, that would explain the increased brain activity (as it would give their brain long enough to engage) and their slightly better accuracy. It would also fit with the profile of the average liberal as someone that doesn’t follow directions too well.

Proves nothing.

First of all, how large was the group? Second, how many conservatives vs. libs… was it evenly divided (what if it was 10 to 1, or 100 to 1)? Third, why was this only done on students? Do I even need to explain the problems with that?

Perhaps the real answer, is that the few conservative students are paying their own way and have jobs, while the liberal students spend all their time smoking pot and playing World of Warcraft, so they’re able to quickly react to pounding keys in reaction to what’s happening on the screen. I’m half joking there, but seriously, shouldn’t one factor in how people react to things appearing on a computer screen? Put someone who’s never used a computer on one and tell them to drag and drop files from one folder to another… then compare how long it takes someone who uses computers regularly.

Ugh, why did I even respond to this? We get these stupid studies every few months, and there are always countless ways to debunk them… but they’ll keep being done. They get funding by promising to “find the answers” to something, and then they pull bullsh** like this. Regular viewers of RedEye are probably numb to this now… they talk about various “studies” so often, that they discuss some that contradict each other only weeks apart.

RightWinged on September 9, 2007 at 9:44 PM

Answering one of my own questions…
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070909/hl_afp/scienceneuroscience_070909173324

A group of 43 right-handed subjects were asked to perform a series of computer tests designed to evaluate their unrehearsed response to cues urging them to break a well-established routine.

Again, how many were libs and how many conservatives? If these were college kids, I suspect it was hard to find conservatives… and as I mentioned, libs who are getting a free ride from mommy and daddy spend their free time playing WoW can certainly react quicker to triggers on a computer screen than their conservative counterparts who have jobs.

Either way, as I said earlier, you could go on and on with the problems here… How conservative were the people… do they even know what that means? Extreme leftists think they’re mainstream these days… does that mean they were “moderates” in this study? etc. etc.

I mean, how many people really believe that something like this, from the minds of doctrinaire leftists, has any validity at all? This is just public money spent on political snark in the name of “science.”

there i think thats a bit better

Indeed, these results might do nothing more than support Stalin’s view of leftist loons as “useful idiots.”

Of course, I do provide example of contradictory leftist wishes. Perhaps, there is less difference here than I think.

Something that “researchers” seem to forget:
Correlation does not imply causation.

Conservatives look at this and make a mental note that if they need someone to perform a stupifyingly boring task, they should hire a liberal to do it.

pedestrian on September 9, 2007 at 10:19 PM

Precisely !

On the other hand, most people who aren’t true believers tend towards the superficial, which could again be characterized as stupid.

Since a close reading of the two previous paragraphs will reveal I’ve said nothing at all, I will suggest an idea for a meaningful basis for this type of research. Use the ideas in the 1964 paper by Converse entitled The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics