Neuroscience
It often feels as though political liberals and conservatives are from different planets – whatever the issue, they come at it from a completely different angle. A new study in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology confirms this impression, finding that liberals and conservatives even take a different approach when confronted with non-political word puzzles.
Carola Salvi and her colleagues at Northwestern University asked 22 liberal and 22 conservative students to try to solve several examples of the Remote Associates Task – this simply involves looking at word triplets (e.g. pine/crab/sauce) and identifying the one word that goes with each of them (in this case APPLE). After each problem, the students stated whether they'd arrived at the solution through insight (suddenly realising the answer without knowing how) or analysis (thinking through the problem logically).
The liberal participants solved more problems by insight (29 per cent) than by analysis (15 per cent) whereas there was no statistically significant difference in the proportion of problems that the conservatives solved by insight or analysis (21 per cent by insight vs. 17.9 per cent by analysis). Moreover, the liberals solved more problems by insight than the conservatives did.
"Our study provides novel evidence that political orientation is associated with problem-solving strategy," the researchers said. "A better understanding of differences in cognitive strategies between individuals holding different social/political orientations may benefit efforts to help them reconcile differences in dealing with social concerns," they concluded, perhaps a little optimistically.
-- The politics of insight
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Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
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Neuroscience
Liberals prefer to solve problems through insight
Carola Salvi and her colleagues at Northwestern University asked 22 liberal and 22 conservative students to try to solve several examples of the Remote Associates Task – this simply involves looking at word triplets (e.g. pine/crab/sauce) and identifying the one word that goes with each of them (in this case APPLE). After each problem, the students stated whether they'd arrived at the solution through insight (suddenly realising the answer without knowing how) or analysis (thinking through the problem logically).
The liberal participants solved more problems by insight (29 per cent) than by analysis (15 per cent) whereas there was no statistically significant difference in the proportion of problems that the conservatives solved by insight or analysis (21 per cent by insight vs. 17.9 per cent by analysis). Moreover, the liberals solved more problems by insight than the conservatives did.
"Our study provides novel evidence that political orientation is associated with problem-solving strategy," the researchers said. "A better understanding of differences in cognitive strategies between individuals holding different social/political orientations may benefit efforts to help them reconcile differences in dealing with social concerns," they concluded, perhaps a little optimistically.
-- The politics of insight
_________________________________
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Our free fortnightly email will keep you up-to-date with all the psychology research we digest: Sign up!
- On Some Issues, Liberals Are More Dogmatic Than Conservatives
In the liberal worldview, conservatives are notoriously narrow-minded – and for years we’ve had the science to prove it. Meta-analyses published in 2003 and 2010 of dozens of studies using different measures revealed a consensus on "the rigidity of...
- Why Conservatives Are Happier Than Liberals
Psychologists at New York University say they've found the answer to why people with right wing political views are happier than left-leaning liberals (as previously indicated by survey research). In short, conservatives are less upset by inequality...
- Gesturing Unlocks Children's Maths Skills
Encouraging children to gesture when they are working on maths problems helps them benefit more from subsequent maths tuition. Sara Broaders and colleagues, who made the observation, say this is because gesturing activates children's implicit maths...
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"This election is all about trust" Conservative leader Michael Howard said at a recent press conference. He presumably thinks trust is a vote-winning issue for the Conservatives, but just how does political distrust affect the way people vote? Some insight...
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Figure 1. Liberals and conservatives in the study of Amodio et al. (2007) voted primarily for Kerry and Bush, respectively, in 2004. Brain wave recordings adapted from Mathalon et al. (2002). You've seen the headlines: Brains of liberals, conservatives...