Liberals might be more likely than conservatives to check out what you are looking at, according to a study published online November 4 in Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics. Experiments show that people take longer to notice when an object appears if they have first seen a face looking in the other direction. Now a team of psychologists and political scientists at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln report that whereas liberals do just that, conservatives do not. The researchers asked 72 undergraduates to look at a drawing of a face that looked to the left or right of a computer screen and then press a key when a black dot appeared. Despite being told the face would not predict the dot’s location, liberals took 10 to 20 milliseconds longer—about 5 percent—to notice the dot when the face looked away from it instead of toward it, indicating that they had followed the face’s gaze. Conservatives did not—they took the same amount of time regardless of where the face looked.
Study co-author Kevin Smith says one possible explanation is that “liberals are more sensitive
to social cues,” such as where someone looks, whereas conservatives value individual independence. Whatever the explanation, the results bolster the idea that political dispositions depend in part on differences in how people use social information.
This article was originally published with the title What Are You Looking At?.
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19 Comments
Add CommentWow, what a piece of garbage story.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat is completely missing is describing how the researchers determined their subjects political orientation.
candide, if you are referring to the two paragraphs above, it's basically a teaser to get you to purchase the full article. I'd imagine that had you bought that, you'd see that the researchers provide whatever methodology they used for labeling their test subjects liberal or conservative.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is pseudoscience crap. The researchers at the UofN-Lincoln have just proved that they know very little about the scientific method.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJust curious... if the tag line had been that conservatives are more sensitive, rather than less, (or any other tag that might seem less negative about conservatives) would your opinion on this being "pseudoscience crap" have changed?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe bias is in the conclusion drawn, not necessarily the methods used.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe obvious conclusion is not that "liberals are more sensitive to social cues" but that conservatives are more susceptible to the lies ("the face would not predict the dot's location") of authority figures.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo, it wouldn't have at all. I'm a libertarian politically, so I'm not a fan of either liberal or conservative policies, but my political inclinations have nothing to do with this.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNow we need to re post the article as: conservatives are more objective and liberals susceptible to social influence. Then see how many conservatives would support the same exact study. LOL
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAlso to Unelected: libertarianism is diametrically opposed to authoritarianism. It is not distinct from the conservative and liberal dichotomy. There are conservative libertarians (i.e. Ron Paul), like most here in the USA, as well as liberal libertarians (i.e. Noam Chomsky).
I agree, the fact that this is pseudoscientific crap is independent of the reader's or author's assumed political orientation and another example of the corrosive effects of reductionism and science replaced by fairy tale story telling.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe bias is in putting any credence on a 5% differentiation as meaningful, assuming that the experiment measures anything about complex social interactions, defining political orientation as either / or vs a complex spectrum, on and on and on.
Why does SciAM waste itself with such crap. This is far from the first time - whether behaviorist, genetic determinism, reading the tea leaves of brain scanning - that Sci Am presents an "explanation" of a complex social interaction reduced to a measurement of blood flow, the relative presence of 500 gene fragments, etc, without any critical thought of how you get from here to there.
My conclusion is that conservatives are better able to follow directions than liberals.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn the words of the Fonz, You're all a bunch o' nerds!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTo Soccerdad: Conservatives are better able to follow directions? Really? OK, follow this one: Go jump in a lake!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLiberals are more concerned with what other people are thinking and feeling. This may not be scientifically verifiable, but it's true nonetheless. This study provides anecdotal support for what everyone already knows.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo, I feel that I just lost 3 minutes of life reading this and wish that someone could explain to me what 'General Excellence' actually means.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYeah - conservatives are more concerned with the facts than what people think.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisActually it's probably that the liberal's reaction time is slowed down by all that pot smoking.
The study in short:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThose who were subjectively identified by the western label of political ideologies differed in their probabilities of being influenced to social cues of still images of another human.
You can bicker about what this means all you want.
I agree that there is more than one possible interpretation of these results. For example, it could be that conservatives average better at blocking out distractions than liberals. Remember the study which showed that many people missed seeing the dancing gorilla when the task was to count basketball passes? Perhaps there were more liberals who saw the gorilla. Not necessarily good or bad either way.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut I think this shows the real problem with getting social sciences up to the level of physical sciences: just about everyone seems to think that the KNOW the only right way to interpret social science results even when there are clearly other possibilities.
Yes, most conservatives are followers, not leaders.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI generally disagree with the slant in most of Soccerdad's comments, but I think the pot smoking jibe is pretty funny. I also don't think Chomsky would agree with the label that Krohleder has assigned him.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think GreenD's got it basically right. You really can't get any political capital out of this no matter how you wish to spin it. It's not serious science and it doesn't throw any light on how people tick politically.