I recently posted a summary of an article that I found interesting and likely to bring out some healthy controversy at PsychInAction. The article was about differences in the ways that liberals and conservatives process information (in the brain). The basic finding was that people who identified as conservative (compared to those who identified as liberal) showed less activity in a brain area that has previously been related to cognitive control during a task that requires one to inhibit a certain prepotent response (basically, you need to switch gears and restrain yourself from the habitual response). In concluding, the authors suggest that while liberals performed better on the laboratory task that required response inhibition, the conservatives in their sample would likely perform better on a task where a fixed response style is optimal.

As with many brain studies, there are several caveats and logical fallacies that are easy to fall into (see here for a discussion of what we can and can’t say with brain data), but in an informal lecture, even scientifically-conservative Russ lamented recently that in order to get papers in places like Nature, we, as scientists need to argue for why our findings are cool and worth the space they take to print in the absence of space to list all of the constraints, assumptions, and other details that might help people fully understand all of the limitations of a given dataset. So, while we should stick closely to our data and not make wild claims about what the brain has to tell us about social scientific questions, using brain data to generate new hypotheses (that are later tested) is how science can move forward.

The study described above is not perfect (would be interesting to see with a larger sample and to know more about third variable personality factors), and it is interesting to consider counter examples (as one colleague pointed out, it would be easy to argue that some religious conservatives show incredible flexibility in taking from the Bible), but I think as scientists, in addition to poking holes in the methods of others (a necessary set of checks and balances), we should also be considering how different methods can inform one another and how to test alternative hypotheses if we don’t believe the findings of published work.