I brought this up as a joke in the other thread.  It’s one small study, which really means almost nothing.

It would be nice if we could sprinkle something in the water that could “cure” people from insisting lies and facts are equivalent arguments—something that made the “some say the world is flay, others that it is spherical” school of journalism obviously farcical to all.

But there’s not, and there never will be.  I’m not sure how we counter Fox News and the tendency to root for your team right or wrong, but the problem isn’t because of hardwired ignorance.

That would be “the world is flat”.  Damn apple’s autocorrect function.

Suppose watching Faux News causes those changes to the brain - increased anxiety, decreased courage?  Perhaps if they went out into the real world and exercised their anterior cingulate, it would grow.  Sort of like how the Grinch’s heart grew once he understood that other people are important, too.

But that suggestion would be met with a collective scream of “nanny state”....*sigh*  JUST like dealing with toddlers.

There’s also a lot of uncertainty about how to interpret fMRI results in general—not just in these controversial areas the media is so fond of.  fMRI shows oxygen use in different brain regions and is pretty noisy, so there’s a lot of room for phantom effects to show up where there are none. See, for instance, an fMRI study where they’ve been able to elicit signals of an “emotional experience” in salmon—only the salmon happened to be dead at the time. See this article for more information.

<blockquote>Because there’s no real evidence that political beliefs are genetic.  <blockquote>

Egg, meet chicken.  Chicken, meet egg. 

The biggest issue with this: we do not know what is genetic in an individual’s brain structure, and which is actually the result of either developmental influences and actual use patterns by the individual.

In short: we don’t know what “larger” or “more active” areas of the brain are that way due to genetics, use, or how they came to be grown.  That makes deterministic inference very dodgy, as Amanda has pointed out.

I don’t know that genetics plays no role at all.  I’m the only lefty in a large conservative family.  The difference is compassion: my parents and siblings seem to lack any capacity for it.  My father is less extreme in his coldness and mistrust than everyone else, which leads me to speculate that I inherited my capacity for standing in other people’s shoes from his side.  Either that or I’m a mutant.  Even as a tiny kid, before I had any idea what politics was or how I felt about it, I realized that I was different from the rest of my family.  Yes, there are cultural factors and interfamily dynamics that might have had some impact, but I don’t see how they alone could have acted to shape my mind so early on. 

I realize that this story has to do with trust and optimism vs. mistrust and pessimism, and my story about compassion doesn’t necessarily fit neatly here.  But my experience still makes it hard for me to believe that genetics, by way of brain structure, has no impact at all on political leanings.  Politics and personality are so closely entwined, and I really can’t believe that genetics has nothing to do with personality.

None of which is to say that conservatives are off the hook even if they did inherit their ugly tendencies.  We hold people accountable for their inherited deficiencies all the time, regardless of whether they’re genetic or environmental.

Thank you for generally working toward the idea that causality is a two-way street.

And “the world is FLAY” sounds like an awesome metal album.

Another thing is that people are complicated.

It’s not the case that liberals are optimists and conservatives are pessimists.  Anecdatally, it looks like the opposite to me: people who were born in privilege and had the world go right for them are generally happy enough with their world view to want to preserve it.  It’s easier to believe the poor are lazy when you, yourself, are well off.  You can lie that you deserve your place, even if you inherited it.  The world works “right”, so why not be happy about it?

But that doesn’t describe every conservative.  It doesn’t describe most members of the tea party.

Brain structure affects people dramatically, but so does upbringing.  People with certain disorders tend to have children with the same disorders, and how much of it is upbringing vs. genetics is very hard to determine b/c we can’t just take kids away from their families and double blind studies on them.

People can be educated.  Choosing to believe lies and choosing to create your own facts just isn’t acceptable.  Opinions can vary, but facts are facts, and we need to work on educating our populace if we want our democratic republic to survive.

Fiora, there’s no reason to think that because wingnuttery runs in families that it has to have a genetic component.  Unless you had a controlled study that showed that people with the same genes grew up with the same outlook despite completely different environments, you really can’t prove much.  But we do have evidence for the nurture argument.  Conservatism is more common in men than women, in rich than poor, in straights than gays, and in whites than non-whites.  In other words, it tailors neatly to having privileges that come from the environment.  Not in all cases, but having privilege—-an environmental factor—-is the best predictor of how conservative someone is likely to be.

Also, the political preferences of genetically linked groups changes faster than could be predicted than by nature. For instance, people that are only one or two generations removed from Irish and Italian immigrants who were politically more liberal, at least when it came to economics, suddenly switched to conservative when they stopped being distinguished socially from Anglo white people. Their genetics didn’t change, but they did.  The only answer is environment.

I would highly, highly recommend Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender. She breaks down all those neuroscience/evpsych arguments for “hardwired” behavior, and in particular, points out why brain scans really don’t tell us very much about what’s going on in your mind. A great feminist-oriented hard science book for those who like to argue with evpsychers.

This is silly. Conservatives have been preying on fears for a long time. It’s not that being fearful makes one conservative; it’s that conservatives have been preying on fears.

Now, of course, that’s in the US - I don’t know if it holds in the UK. But if the same pattern holds, it explains the difference more appropriately (which, honestly, still means “not at all appropriately” - but less *inappropriately*) than claiming hardwired political beliefs.

Sometimes it is fun to take the low road; maybe it is time to classify conservitives like other people who are incapable of entering contracts or voting due to impaired mental condtion.

@Flora:  I have similar experiences.

You know, the only thing about liberals where I can never agree, is this bias towards “nurture”.  I am no scientist, but I read a lot of books about language development, brain development, blah blah blah, and it seems that in the science community there is very little to no debate about the nature vs nurture debate.  All these twin studies, adopted children studies, separated at birth twin studies, all this crap, it always seems like all these personality traits are more born than raised.

I for one, feel very comfortable with treating conservatives as people who are born different than me.  Every time I am having a discussion with educated, interesting people, they always turn out to all be liberals and it ends up feeling a little bit like the discussion is somewhat… inbred?  And as much as conservatives piss me off with their dismissal of women and “colored” and gays as people, damn, I wish I could find a conservative to have a civilized discussion with that won’t start insulting anyone or crying and shit.  The closest one is my brother (the only one in five siblings who was born conservative), and we all walk on eggshells around him trying not to break his conservative ego.  I know for his conservative wife, my fabulous, childless life is a judgement on her domestic ways.  And it makes me feel guilty that she might have to think, so when she asks when I has the kids, I say I’m too poor.  You have to show compassion to the conservatives.  They’re different.

Also, sorry, I’m drunk.  Happy holidays!!

This is probably asking for a shitstorm, but it is likely that sexual preference is genetically based so it is just as likely that fearful attitudes are genetically based.  I dont think you can treat these studies like evolutionary psychology.

...well, you see, when our primitive, cave-dwelling forebears were confronted with the basic struggle to stay alive and propagate the species, it was necessary for some of them to develop a love for the common, everyday, wisdom of Ronald Reagan and Sarah Palin.  This gave them an important edge in the struggle to survive, because…blah blah blah…

...forget it.  This kind of nature v. nurture crap is really getting old.  If the arguments stay on a purely scientific level they’re bad enough.  When they leak over into the mass media, they’re always used to either justify some outrageous behavior or dismiss it (or both), or condemn something someone doesn’t like for political reasons — adding a thin veneer of “science” to cloak whatever agenda they want to push/believe.

John and Jane Prole don’t understand enough about science to make any reasonable stab at some sort of perspective.  So preliminary and possibly irresponsible statements get turned into memes that get incorporated into the popular culture, with no gate-keepers to help separate the wheat from the chaff and lend a sense of caution to calm down the irrational exuberance of some.

When the memes finally turn up on Glenn Beck’s show, or in a Sarah Palin speech, it’s too damn late.  The handbasket we’re strapped into simply picks up another burst of speed on its journey to hell…

Oh, fuck.

There’s not much debate on nature vs. nurture because it’s a fucking dead issue. The question from here on out is how do genetic, environmental, behavioral, and social factors interact as a complex system. Arguing nature vs. nurture these days is like arguing whether our flat earth is a circle or square. Both positions are bullshit.

@Inverarity thank you for mentioning Cordelia Fine. Delusions of Gender is the perfect supplement to this post. Dr. Fine would destroy this news story.

Amanda, there is a paper from the American Political Science Review from 2005 that purports to use twin studies to ‘prove’ that some political beliefs (as measured by responses on a battery of questions about political beliefs) are heritable. When I read it, I had objections to it, but I can’t remember what they are now—it probably had something to do with the idea that the whole political spectrum is a social construct to begin with, so trying to connect genetics with particular political positions is an exercise in absurdity. “hey guys, I’ve found a statistically significant correlation between the length of the average voter’s hair and whether they voted for Jerry Brown.” Anyway, it’s out there.

The hardwired political beliefs really makes very little sense to me. We have geographic regions in this country that are very conservative and others that are liberal or moderate. There are other countries that are overwhelmingly conservative or overwhelmingly liberal. We have also historically had countries that made pretty rapid transitions from overwhelmingly conservative to liberal. Canada is a good example of the former. It was a pretty small-c conservative place before the 1960s but then became the first country in the Americas with universal healthcare and quickly made peace with a multicultural society when previously it was either staunchly Anglo or French-Canadian. Does this mean that before the 1960s, Canadians had large amygdalas but afterwards smaller ones? Do conservative nations like Switzerland generally have a population with larger amygdalas than say more liberal ones like Sweden?

  What about the countries that are open to the welfare state but not social liberalism like many of the Arab monarchies like Saudi Arabia or less controversially South Korea or Japan, which while not strictly conservative aren’t exactly social liberal paradises either?

And what the fucking fuck? It’s a pre-press announcement! We can’t even talk about the science behind the media’s weasel-word laden coverage because it hasn’t been fucking published yet.

One problem with nature/nurture studies is that the wiring of the human brain isn’t complete until the second <strike>year</strike>decade or so, by which time an <strike>infant</strike> adult has undergone substantial socialization.

Fixed that.

I’ll make a $5 bet that like dozens of previous brain studies the results can be summed as, “some are larger, some are smaller, and if we crunch the numbers hard enough in an ANOVA we get significance at the 0.05 level.”

...well, you see, when our primitive, cave-dwelling forebears were confronted with the basic struggle to stay alive and propagate the species, it was necessary for some of them to develop a love for the common, everyday, wisdom of Ronald Reagan and Sarah Palin.  This gave them an important edge in the struggle to survive, because…blah blah blah…

Well, no, but a mixture of people on an axis between neophiliac and neophobic was probably of use to a tribe.

What Lee said.  I think there’s more evidence that sexual orientation has a genetic component—-though it’s hardly the only factor.  In many things, it’s both nature AND nurture.  But, as Lee noted, political affiliation is influenced so dramatically by geography, race, gender, wealth, and social status that a genetic component seems unlikely.  You want to talk family?  Here’s an example: my great-grandparents on one side and grandparents on another were Democratic voters of the union-loving variety.  The generations after were conservative.  Then you have me and my sister, a liberal and a moderate.  That kind of strict generational shift indicates that genetics are less important than history.

But as I noted before, the biggest argument against it is that people who move from being not considered really white to being considered white, with all its attendant privileges, switch political affiliations almost immediately.  Their genes don’t change.  But their environment does.  And that changes their political leanings. 

The heritability of politics tends to be most intense when privileges or oppressions are passed down.  Black people aren’t more liberal than white people in the U.S. because of genetic variance; it’s because of power and who has it and who doesn’t.

The brain scan explains to me why there are those who associate any form of action with negative behaviour.  They preserve the status quo through maintaining a general passive mode.  “Action”, on the other hand, tends to be driven by fear and other negative emotions.  There are whole ideologies that uphold this perspective, especially those that state that humans are intrinsically sinful:  the more you act out of your own initiative, the more you express “sin”.

The ability to act in the world is linked to courage and the capacity to think on the bright side.  There are people who know that when they do something, they are not just going to make things worse by expressing their “sinful” disposition.  People who are capable of acting in the world are those who have not been conditioned to believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with them.

@29 Amanda,

Yeah, but then, you’re limiting your idea of “conservative” or “liberal”.  A conservative isn’t necessarily someone who votes republican.  Conservatives are people who have higher regards for their own groups than the other groups even in the face of suffering, or who do not question authority, even in the face of suffering.  Under this definition, tons of people who vote democrat can be conservative because they are doing it out of groupness or maybe because everyone else in the neighborhood is doing it.  Lots of those people who were marginalized before but become white (and therefore, conservatives) are backing the establishment now just as they were backing their ant-establishment before, out of groupness. 

@30 scratchy,

But people’s dispositions show waaaaaay before they have been socialized.  As early as 1 month in, babies have distinct personalities, that probably preface their socialization.  But ITA with you on everything else.

raspberryjamba —I wasn’t suggesting anything about hard-wiring. What made you think I was?

@scratchy,

Huh.  I guess I agree with you on everything except I didn’t realize you think those differences are all the result of conditioning.  I thought you were talking about people’s born differences in disposition, wether they choose to do or choose to not do, what they feel, what kind of arguments they make when they justify their decisions.  So you really think people are blank slates?

The Russian silver fox breeding studies(which started back around the time I was born and it was a Soviet Union study then)  are revealing:

The experiment was initiated by scientists hoping to produce easier to handle fur animals[citation needed] and who were interested in the topic of domestication and the process by which wolves became tame domesticated dogs. They saw some retention of juvenile traits by adult dogs, both morphological ones, such as skulls that were unusually broad for their length, and behavioral ones, such as whining, barking, and submission.

In a time when Lysenkoism was an official state doctrine, Belyaev’s commitment to classical genetics had cost him his job as head of the Department of Fur Animal Breeding at the Central Research Laboratory of Fur Breeding in Moscow in 1948[citation needed]. During the 1950s, he continued to conduct genetic research under the guise of studying animal physiology.

Belyaev believed that the key factor selected for domestication of dogs was not size or reproduction, but behavior; specifically, amenability to domestication, or tameability. He selected for low flight distance, that is, the distance one can approach the animal before it runs away. By selecting this behaviour it mimics what happened through natural selection in the ancestral past of dogs. More than any other quality, Belyaev believed, tameability must have determined how well an animal would adapt to life among humans. Because behavior is rooted in biology, selecting for tameness and against aggression means selecting for physiological changes in the systems that govern the body’s hormones and neurochemicals. Belyaev decided to test his theory by domesticating foxes; in particular, the silver fox, a dark colour form of the red fox. He placed a population of them in the same process of domestication, and he decided to submit this population to a strong selection pressure for inherent tameness.[1]

The result is that Russian scientists now have a number of domesticated foxes that are fundamentally different in temperament and behavior from their wild forebears. Some important changes in physiology and morphology are now visible, such as mottled or spotted coloured fur. Many scientists believe that these changes related to selecting for tameness are caused by lower adrenaline production in the new breed, which causes these physiological changes in a very small number of generations, thus allowing for these new genetic offshoots not present in the original species.

OTOH, a recent review of molecular biology as it applies to human neurology that there haven’t been any genes associated with intelligence per se, and intelligence is probably multi-varient in the way it is inherited.

@35 Jerome:
“their none to bright”
Snicker.  Maybe the study also found a difference in the sizes of the brain modules that regulate spelling?  Seriously, why is grammar and spelling so difficult for conservatives?
My poor brother, bless his heart, is always sending me all this shit to edit, because, like every good conservative, he can’t write worth two shits.  This is why I like reading about these studies.  They give me hope that someday we might find a way to spot these differences before the children have to go to school, and we can track them so that the little conservatives get the guidance they need!

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Because there’s no real evidence that political beliefs are genetic.

Well, there are some interesting results from twin studies, but these have been subject to considerable criticism. (Stick “political views twin studies” into Google Scholar and you’ll find both.)

Of course, the question of what exactly we mean by “political beliefs” gets interesting… I could buy the idea that genotype could influence brain development in ways which might tend to predispose someone towards particular modes of thought (e.g. anxiety) which in turn may predispose someone towards certain political attitudes, but that’s a very long way from a genetic basis for specific political beliefs, never mind something like a “Republican gene”.

Wow, what’s with the spam blizzard?

Anyway, back to the topic at hand: even if the study was larger, fMRI results not so ambiguous, nature vs. nurture in brain development definitively settled, and political leanings not such an ambiguous social construct, the conclusion this article reaches would still be bullshit.

The amygdala is important for all kinds of emotional responses, not just fear/trust. We by no means know all the different brian proceses it regulates, but it’s a center for all sorts of activity to do with insitnctive reactions, learning, decision making and more. It’s completely indispensible for decision making - people with damage to that region find it impossible to make trivial choices like what to wear or what to order from a menu.

So when I saw this headline I was like “eh? Conservatives are emotional ditherers?” - it never even occurred to me to jump to the conclusion that they “reached”. Truly, a little danger is a knowledgeable thing, which is why you won’t catch me drawing such broad conclusions from so little -I should say, no - information.

Mmmmmmmmm, this paper, which I’m too cheap to buy,  is interesting:

The central amygdala (CEA), a nucleus predominantly composed of GABAergic inhibitory neurons, is essential for fear conditioning. How the acquisition and expression of conditioned fear are encoded within CEA inhibitory circuits is not understood. Using in vivo electrophysiological, optogenetic and pharmacological approaches in mice, we show that neuronal activity in the lateral subdivision of the central amygdala (CEl) is required for fear acquisition, whereas conditioned fear responses are driven by output neurons in the medial subdivision (CEm). Functional circuit analysis revealed that inhibitory CEA microcircuits are highly organized and that cell-type-specific plasticity of phasic and tonic activity in the CEl to CEm pathway may gate fear expression and regulate fear generalization. Our results define the functional architecture of CEA microcircuits and their role in the acquisition and regulation of conditioned fear behaviour.

For you folks who don’t speak science:

The central amygdala, composed mainly of GABAergic inhibitory neurons, is the part of the brain that processes Pavlovian conditioned fear. Two groups reporting in this issue of Nature use different yet complementary experimental approaches to arrive at similar conclusions about the functional architecture that underlies the conditioned fear response. They find that two microcircuits are involved, one required for fear acquisition and the other for conditioned fear responses. Haubensak et al. use genetically based functional manipulations to identify a subpopulation of GABAergic neurons that has a key role in gating learned fear. Ciocchi et al. use a combination of in vivo electrophysiological, optogenetic and pharmacological approaches in mice to identify three functionally distinct types of neurons that are embedded in a highly organized local disinhibitory network.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v468/n7321/full/nature09559.html

There’s a difference between a temperamentally fearful personality, and one that has had a lot of conditioned fear in their life, and I believe that difference is due to nurture, not genetics.

Well, this does match a earlier (also small) study that found (simplistically summarizing) that fearful, timid children grew up to be conservatives.

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2006/03/23_block.shtml

Twenty years later, the Blocks followed up with more surveys. Data collected for 95 of the original participants found that those “relatively conservative at age 23 were described (as children) as feeling easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited and relatively over-controlled and vulnerable.” Meanwhile, preschool children who turned out to be liberals were characterized as “developing close relationships, self-reliant, energetic, somewhat dominating, relatively under-controlled and resilient.”

Does the new study being discussed say the “hard-wiring” is from birth?  Could it not be that a mixture of genetics AND environment shape the brain in such a way that it predisposes someone to a particular worldview, that then fits a specific political group that exists at a specific time and place?

1. person is born with a predisposition to be fearful.
2. person’s upbringing (family and larger environment) reinforces that predisposition rather than mitigates it.
3. As an adult that person then finds they fit well with a particular political party that emphasizes fear of the “other” to gain/maintain power.

@Comment #40: Boycott on 12/30 at 03:43 AM

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@Comment #35: Jerome B.  on 12/30 at 12:29 AM

“I’m not a scientist,” Uh no shit, but don’t let that stop you from pontificating on a range of subjects ...

I always find it odd, how conservatives hate nothing more than simple honesty.

“There’s also a lot of uncertainty about how to interpret fMRI results in general—not just in these controversial areas the media is so fond of.  fMRI shows oxygen use in different brain regions and is pretty noisy, so there’s a lot of room for phantom effects to show up where there are none. See, for instance, an fMRI study where they’ve been able to elicit signals of an “emotional experience” in salmon—only the salmon happened to be dead at the time.”

It always bugs when I see articles that take snippets from some study and then spin the results to fit a specific narrative.  We don’t really know anything about how this study was conducted, and there are so many extraneous factors that could potentially explain away the cited results that it all sounds pretty sloppy.  Personally, I can’t submit to an MRI without serious sedation, it’s small and confining and the noise is horrendous.  My experience in this regard is hardly unique, and I can’t but wonder if the sampling population in this study had similar reactions to the MRI experience.  Unless the study controlled for these sorts of factors I don’t see how it could possibly demonstrate the premise cited in all of the press coverage it is receiving.

On a completely unrelated note, yikes the spamming has been getting out of control suddenly!

Woodrowfan @44: I find that study interesting. I was a fearful child (just ask my siblings!), and conservative (okay, ‘libertarian’) at 23, but 20+ years later I’m about as liberal/progressive as the day is long. I wonder if they’re going to follow up in another 20 years.

Does the new study being discussed say the “hard-wiring” is from birth?

No, it doesn’t.

I’m failing to see how this study claims what Amanda says it claims.

People whose brains show evidence that they are more fearful are more likely to vote conservative. I’m not seeing how that suggests that the brain wiring is genetic, given brain plasticity, or that the term “hardwiring” even implies genetics… environmental factors make a *huge* impact on the brain, as does early socialization.

There are also some confounds. Amanda points out, correctly, that historically oppressed groups vote more liberally than privileged groups, and that when oppression disappears and a formerly oppressed people are fully integrated, they show a lot more evidence of conservative voting patterns… but all this says is that you can’t study oppressed people to see this particular pattern, because oppressed people will vote liberally as liberalism stands in opposition to their oppression, so regardless of whether they would be inclined to vote conservatively in a world where they were part of the top-level category, they will vote their interests when they are oppressed.

(This becomes more obvious with women. Women are an oppressed category, but also a majority who are much more socially integrated with the top-level category than any other oppressed group, given that by definition we are related to them. And women do vote more liberally than men, but not in nearly the ratio that say, black people vote more liberally than white people. Is this because women are more ignorant of their own oppression, or is this because, the bigger the category of the oppressed people, the more likely you’re going to see their natural inclination to be conservative or liberal surface despite their status as an oppressed group?)

Consider the powerful strains of anti-black racism in the Jewish community and anti-Semitic bigotry in the black community… oppressed people have no problem turning around and oppressing someone else. If you’re inclined to desire to oppress people who are not like you, if you have an authoritarian mindset, you may vote liberally because that protects you, but that doesn’t mean you are actually *inclined* to by nature.

This study doesn’t say “voting against health care reform is genetically predetermined”; *what* conservative and liberal represent will vary from nation to nation, and time period to time period. At one point, the sterilization of people who didn’t speak English very well was considered a liberal value in this country. At one point, the cutting edge of feminism was the belief that women’s gentle souls and soft natures made them naturally better suited to parent than men. In general, though, conservatism always represents the status quo and the preservation of the existing power structure, or the violent overthrow of recent reforms to the power structure in favor of reverting society to a power structure that recently existed, and liberalism always represents movement toward a flattening of hierarchies, greater acceptance of a wider variety of different people, and movement away from the existing power structure toward one that is seen as fairer or more equitable. People who are specifically oppressed by the existing power structure will always align themselves with those who want to flatten it, but that doesn’t mean that their natural desire is for a flat structure, and in fact, this concept of “hard-wired conservatism” might explain why revolutions fail… there’s too many people in the revolution who are revolting because they’re the guys on the bottom, and they want to be on top, for the revolution to actually flatten anything.

I will say this. Even if conservatism and liberalism *were* “genetic”, it is entirely possible, and desirable, to change the definitions of what “conservatism” means by exposing children to sufficient numbers of people who are “not like them” that their concept of in-group, or tribal loyalty, changes. Liberalism wins in the end, over time, in this theory, because the reforms that liberals force onto conservatives, in coalition with “genetic conservatives” who are currently oppressed, expose “genetic conservative” children to people who were previously defined as out-group, and as those children absorb the idea that that group is in-group, even the “genetic conservative” children embrace those people as part of their own tribe.

Anyone who knows a liberal person who comes from a conservative family knows that genetics are strongly determinant on this issue.

We have geographic regions in this country that are very conservative and others that are liberal or moderate.

Which is trivial to explain in the presence of the free movement of human beings.  Gay folks and liberals drift to the cities, conservative folks head out to the exurbs.

That said, what is almost certainly genetic is a tendency toward conservatism or liberalism.  Obviously, socialization is enormously important.

I wonder how similar politics and religion will turn out to be in the sense of being predisposed by nature or nurture. 

Certainly people tend to marry those similar to them in both political and religious beliefs.  Then they try or hope to inculcate those beliefs in their children.

We also have to remember that one study is essentially the same as no studies.  Though it is marginally better than “my family is all conservative and I’m a liberal so that completely disproves the idea that genetics could have any part in the matter.”

“I’m not a scientist,” Uh no shit, but don’t let that stop you from pontificating on a range of subjects that you’ve read a couple of articles about
Jerome B.

“I’m not a journalist,” Beck said
Glenn Beck: “I’m not a scientist,”
Glenn Beck: I’m Not Seditious
“I’m not Martin Luther King,” Beck said.
Glenn Beck: I’m Not a Fear Monger.
GLENN BECK: ... P.S., I’m not a racist.

Oblivious troll is oblivious

Amanda @10:  That’s a wonderfully concise refutation of a lot of genetic causation stuff:  If it’s genetic, why does it change so rapidly?

I’ll make a $5 bet that like dozens of previous brain studies the results can be summed as, “some are larger, some are smaller, and if we crunch the numbers hard enough in an ANOVA we get significance at the 0.05 level.”

Comment #26: CBrachyrhynchos on 12/29 at 11:52 PM

Exactly.  There seems to be a general misunderstanding of what .05 means.  It doesn’t mean “it’s true”, it means “there’s a 5% chance this is just coincidence”.

But even that meaning changes in the context of doing a large number of experiments, since 5% of the time those experiments will give a false positive, but way more than 5% of published research shows postive results (or, I should say, refute the null hypothesis).

The more science-geeky around here have probably already read Jonah Lehrer’s New Yorker piece titled “The Decline Effect”, about how follow-up research shows a lessening effect for breakthrough discoveries.  He gets overly cute about the phenomenon by quoting one of his subjects talking about “cosmic habituation”, but it’s a useful reminder that science is not the opposite of belief, as Ricky Gervais implied in that article of his posted here about a week ago.

Some good riffing by others on the Leher article (though overly sanguine about the problems Lehrer lays out, IMHO):

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=in-praise-of-scientific-error-2010-12-20

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=the-truth-well-doubt-does-the-decli-2010-12-13

And Lehrer’s rebuttal:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/12/the-mysterious-decline-effect/

It makes me think we should have a five year rule for “discoveries”:  If the effect is still reported five years after the first papers, that’s strong evidence that something is actually there.  I like Lehrer’s description of a web of interconnected discoveries to support a theory:

Don’t just fixate on the effect size – look at the web. Unfortunately for the denialists, climate change and natural selection have very sturdy webs.

@55: The fact that the newspapers are reporting yet again on pre-publication research really annoys me. There’s a peer-review process for a reason.

I’m reminded of a comment that Dr. Pamela Gay made in one of the AstronomyCast episodes where she talked about her Ph.D. thesis. After several years of study and crunching the numbers she was vindicated with results that supported her hypothesis but were practically useless. I feel the same way about my Ph.D. thesis.

Realistic science fiction starts with, “once upon a time, there was a graduate student,” climaxes with, “there’s a 5% chance I could be wrong,” and ends with, “more research is necessary to…”

Exactly.  There seems to be a general misunderstanding of what .05 means.  It doesn’t mean “it’s true”, it means “there’s a 5% chance this is just coincidence”.

In other words, one of 20 studies with a .05 significance will show a coincidental result.  That is a boatload of studies.  And if one of 20 studies is “interesting”  in this way, it’s going to get a lot of attention.

Actually .05 significance doesn’t mean that the result was positive for 5% of cases; it means that there is a 5% chance that the observed difference in conservative brains was just a random chance that the conservative brains selected just so happen to have larger amydagalas or whatever and that there actually isn’t any difference between conservative and liberal brains. the significance is a function of the sample size, and the magnitude of the difference between the two samples being compared.

I should add that very small sample sizes are a big problem in these kinds of studies.  One outlier can change the findings.  Other studies often can’t replicate the findings of small fMRI studies, probably because of the amount of noise.

And I agree with the commenter who pointed out that the nature vs. nurture paradigm is pretty much dead.

Also, I would like to recommend Cordelia Fine’s book as well as Rebecca Jordan-Young’s Brainstorm and Lise Eliot’s Pink Brain, Blue Brain.  They have different approaches to the research into gender differences but the books complement each other quite well.

I’m writing a series of posts on them,  including the impossibility of gender-neutral parenting and <a href=“http://echidneofthesnakes.blogspot.com/2010_12_26_archive.html#5233731403505826038”>some complications in the study of sex differences.  More to come.

It’s interesting that this argument is used both ways by conservative ideology.  “Nature” is used to attack the idea that social programs and education can improved people’s lives because “they” are by nature irredeemable. (also used with racism, and class attitudes toward “good breeding”.  On the other hand, being gay is a choice.

hell, nothing is really “hard wired” into a human brain at all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity

There are a couple of other notes of caution that should be mentioned…

1. As far as i could tell from listening to the Today program segment*, the study only asked for participants to self-identify their political views, so they may have said “Labour”, “Conservative”, Liberal”, “Right”, “Left” or whatever, but I don’t think there was any questionnaire used to objectively identify their position on a variety of political subjects.

2. This was a UK study. Over here “liberal” and “conservative” don’t exactly mean the same things they do in the US.

To be fair, the Today report was very balanced and cautious in its reporting, but even listening to it at the time I had no doubt other sections of the media would either leave out many of the caveats, spin the results to their own agenda or both.

* - The study being reported here was instigated by Colin Firth as “guest Editor” of the BBC’s flagship morning news program “The Today Program”. Having guest editors in the week between Christmas and New Year has become a bit of a tradition and the celebrities are encouraged to pursue themes or ideas which interest them or which they think are not given full enough coverage by regular news people.  Interviewed about why he wanted to investigate this subject, Firth made some interesting points about how people with different political ideologies see the same realities in different ways.

This goes also for the “female brain” studies: when they examine the brains of teenage or adult women, they’re looking at brains that were formed by society’s sex/gender (cisgender) roles and expectations. Not to reinforce these roles and expectations.

I wonder if the researchers would find a more “male” brain if they examined only women who are doing graduate work in mathematics and physics, or women who are out butches, or on the other hand a more “female” brain if they examine only women who wear and decorate with Lilly Pulitzer and entertain from Martha Stewart without irony.

“I’m not a scientist,” Uh no shit, but don’t let that stop you from pontificating on a range of subjects that you’ve read a couple of articles about

Hey, I am a scientist with some pretty nice paper to back me up in more than one field, and I am not averse to giving Amanda some flack when she lacks understanding of some of the more sophisticated issues in scientific interpretation.

HOWEVER, for a lay person she does way better at understanding the science than most so-called “science journalists” who are paid professionally to get a clue but are too busy pointing out the “journalist” bit to spend a lot of time on the “getting the science” bit of their jobs.

As you just dropped into troll, you obviously wouldn’t know that - or know that this place is crawling with scientists who both admire Amanda’s autodidactic acumen, while not being afraid to call her out from time to time.

One of my favorites of these types of studies, with a small sample size, re-peer-review, is one from years ago that showed that when (American) conservatives were asked to explain justifications for liberal viewpoints, they had high rates of success, but when liberals were asked to do the same, they failed more frequently.

Conservatives cheered this as a demonstration that liberals suck at the very thing they claim to have: understanding.

Liberals used it as an illustration that conservative views are illogical (a view to which in my more hotheaded moments I happen to subscribe).

From the given data, you could argue either of these are true, but because the sample size was small, it’s impossible to tell if either of these options or yet another unvoiced is the reason why.  It could be all the liberals interviewed were working class and all the conservatives interviewed were Harvard grads (access/education/economics), or it could be the liberals were old and the conservatives young (generational drift), or for yet another (or combination) of hundreds of reasons I don’t feel like typing right now.

The authors of this study, to get it published, would have needed to articulate the vast limitations as to what the study can actually conclude, or any credible paper would have rejected it.  Unfortunately, beat reporters have no such obligation to do the same.  Since most journal articles sit behind a paywall, but their abstracts will make it into press releases, this can lead to some very creative extrapolating by both reporters and Average Joe Reader.

This is why trying to read about science in popular form drives me absolutely crazy.