{"id":29,"date":"2007-09-23T01:46:03","date_gmt":"2007-09-23T05:46:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/prefrontal.org\/blog\/2007\/09\/liberal-vs-conservative-brains-ugh\/"},"modified":"2026-03-06T13:29:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-06T20:29:08","slug":"liberal-vs-conservative-brains-ugh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/prefrontal.org\/blog\/2007\/09\/liberal-vs-conservative-brains-ugh\/","title":{"rendered":"Liberal vs Conservative Brains (ugh)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week I managed to get mixed up in a huge debate on Slate.com<\/a> regarding the recent Amodio, Jost, Master, and Yee paper in Nature Neuroscience. The paper was a brief report on the \u2018Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism<\/a>\u2019 where the authors reported that liberals possessed a greater error-related negativity (ERN) wave during a Go\/NoGo task. What erupted after its publication was a partisan firestorm.<\/p>\n

I panned the article at first since it was so far outside of my core interests. The paper also combined a two topics I consider questionable: ERP source localization and political social neuroscience. Still, a few days later while reading Slate I ran across a response piece posted by William Saletan, entitled “Rigging a study to make conservatives look stupid<\/a>“. At once I was struck by how terribly argued the response was and how far from scientific truth his conclusions were. I was compelled to enter \u2018The Fray\u2019 and engage the debate as a neuroscientist. See my original post with subsequent responses here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want to reignite the liberal vs conservative debate again in this forum. Judging from the Slate message boards I think the topic has been given more than enough attention. However, I did want to note how misinterpreted the Amodio et al. results were. I am not a huge fan of the paper – I have various issues with both their method and the discussion of results. Still, seeing headlines like \u201cLiberals smarter than conservatives\u201d and “Rigging a study to make conservatives look stupid” was not their fault. They are simply terrible examples of how mass media can take things to far. <\/p>\n

The whole situation is very frustrating, but there are lessons we can take away from it. I think what I am focusing on is the importance of public dissemination of research by the experts themselves. I try to do this through presentations on the developing brain for parents and children. It is one of the favorite parts about my job, and something I take very seriously. Without a third party between my words and their ears I feel that I can more accurately represent the science behind development. I think that this, in some small way, will help to balance out the terrible misinterpretations by popular media. One can hope anyway…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week I managed to get mixed up in a huge debate on Slate.com regarding the recent Amodio, Jost, Master, and Yee paper in Nature Neuroscience. The paper was a brief report on the \u2018Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism\u2019 where the authors reported that liberals possessed a greater error-related negativity (ERN) wave during a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cognitive-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/prefrontal.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/prefrontal.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/prefrontal.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prefrontal.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prefrontal.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/prefrontal.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1577,"href":"https:\/\/prefrontal.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions\/1577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/prefrontal.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prefrontal.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prefrontal.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}