D: And that's the same part that
is involved in the Democrats, in the present study, in this "Red-Brain, Blue-Brain"
study.
R: OK. Tell me what you can extrapolate from this.
D: Well, I think we always have
to be careful. If you want to be a good
scientist, you've got to put caveats on everything, and bound what you
know.
I think one of the things that is really fascinating is that there does
appear to be this difference between how Republicans and Democrats, Conservatives
and Liberals, are viewing the world. This
is mirrored by a series of other studies that have shown some similar
patterns. There was a study done in the
UK (which is where I'll be moving next).
This study was done by a research group led by Ryota Kanai, and the
actor Colin Firth, actually, was one of the other co-authors on this
study. He got involved in trying to
understand the differences of why people who didn't share his political
ideology were thinking that way, and teamed up with some neuroscientists, and
they funded a study to look at the brains of young people in the United Kingdom,
to see - could they tell differences between Liberals Conservatives in the UK? And what they found was they could; and they
could see differences in a part of the brain called the "anterior cingulate,"
as well as in the right amygdala, which is where we found our differences
also. So there appears to be, not only
in the United States, but in other countries as well, some differences between
how Liberals and Conservatives view the world.
Other studies have shown that Conservatives have more intense reactions
to threatening stimuli, or to disgusting stimuli. They'll put a pair of headphones on
somebody's ears, and then blast them with white noise (which is really
unpleasant to hear), and the stronger your galvanic skin response (basically
using the equipment similar to a lie detector), the sharper the jump you have
in your heart rate, or your breathing rate, or your galvanic skin response, to
that white noise being played in your ear, the more likely are you to be
socially conservative.
So, there appears to be some convergence of evidence suggesting
differences in the way that Conservatives and Liberals, Democrats and
Republicans, are viewing the world that they're interacting with. These appear also to have some relationship
to (maybe) genetics. What's really fascinating
-
R: OK, before we move to
genetics, let me ask you a question here.
D: Sure.
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