Researchers show that liberals and conservatives approach everyday decisions differently.
latimes.com
latimes.com
"Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W"
to
"Based on the results, he said, liberals could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas."
!
As the article notes, political orientation is correlated with a lot of things: income, education, religion, race/ethnicity, etc. Even if they tried to control for any possible confounding variables (the article doesn't mention whether they did), I'm very skeptical that they've successfully isolated a causal relationship between liberalism/conservatism and some innate brain capacity that makes you good at pressing a button at the right time.
And here I was hoping that drive-by downmodding was confined to reddit.
If you don't like the story, fine. But don't take it out on the people who... as it happens, also thought the story was worthless, but found that worthlessness worth mentioning.
As for my interest: I quit a psych degree after a year because the teaching of experimental psychology convinced me that it isn't a serious science. Experiments like this are sadly not uncommon - experimenters decide what they want to quantify, but then measure whatever they can, no matter how tenuous the link between the two.
Somewhat unfortunately slanted article, I'm afraid. It makes it sound like conservatives are broken. In fact, one could just as easily have constructed the task so that the extra deliberation made by liberals caused them to perform worse (by changing how errors and time are used in the final score).
I think the argument has got to be that there are multiple strategies for dealing with uncertainty in the world and the correct one depends on the world as much as anything else. I believe that we are in a world that favors Kerry's style of decision making over Bush's. But, that's a claim about the world, not a value judgment about Kerry, per se.