Here's an interesting study write-up in the L.A. Times which seems to indicate political orientation is hard-wired into the brain.

Study finds left-wing brain, right-wing brain

Even in humdrum nonpolitical decisions, liberals and conservatives literally think differently, researchers show...

Exploring the neurobiology of politics, scientists have found that liberals tolerate ambiguity and conflict better than conservatives because of how their brains work....

Previous psychological studies have found that conservatives tend to be more structured and persistent in their judgments whereas liberals are more open to new experiences. The latest study found those traits are not confined to political situations but also influence everyday decisions.

Liberals, break out the party favors! Your brains have just been proven inherently more agile and open-minded than those of conservatives. You think faster and process new information better. You are more open to new ideas and information, and more accurate in your reasoning, it would seem.

(They why, I can't help but wonder, do I have so much trouble getting y'all to look at contrary information and give me a rational response?)

Well, before we get too excited, let's look a bit into the details. What unnoticed variables have we failed to account for here?

1. Students: The first thing to point out is that the experiment apparently only tested college students. Samples of college students aren't generally great representations of the general population. (They typically fall within a narrow age range, for example.)

Worse, the college environment is a politically rarefied atmosphere (not least around Psych departments, much less at New York University) and college psych experiments often draw upon -- well, college psych students, and people who interested in psych experiments.

Again, that doesn't prove the results are wrong, but it certainly seems to indicate the experiment should probably retried with people randomly selected from the general populace.

2. Brain structure? According to the Times, this purports to show there are two entirely different "types" of brain ("conservative" and "liberal") -- seemingly physically different in some fundamental not-easily-changeable fashion. ("There are two cognitive styles -- a liberal style and a conservative style.")

Yet we know that many people grow conservative as they grow older. (And a few go the other way.) So did 9/11 cause many formerly "liberal" brains suddenly convert, physically, into "conservative" brains? Or is it actually, as so many former liberals insist, that exposure to different ideas and new information changed their minds, and thus political views?

3. Political self-identification: The next problem is that the students were asked to identify themselves politically, rather than using an instrument (a set of questions) to probe political views, such as stance on abortion, socialized healthcare, gun bans, etc.

My experience is that young people holding extremely liberal views often misidentify themselves as apolitical, "moderate", or only slightly liberal. So students who would identify as "liberal" or "very liberal" at a University would be, I would guess, unusually liberal by real-world standards.

4. What is being measured? The write-up in the LA Times says that what's being measured here is "processes[ing] information" and how our brains "tolerate ambiguity and conflict", and deal with "conflicts between a habitual tendency... and a more appropriate response." A UC Berkeley "researcher" the LA Times quoted even compared the brain activity being measured to Bush's stance on the Iraq war, John Kerry's 2004 campaign platform, or even changing one's religious views.

Yet as William Saletan points out, that's not at all what the study measured -- participants were required to respond within half a second to a stimulus: whatever you're measuring at that speed, it most certainly isn't our rational thought processes, much less the kind of thought process responsible for a change in religious views.

As Amodio [the man who designed the experiment] explained to the Sacramento Bee, "It's too quick for you to think consciously about what you're doing."

Further, definite characters were being shown on a screen: so it's not clear how this relates, either, to dealing with ambiguity.

In other words, complexity and ambiguity weren't tested; they were excluded. The study was designed to prevent them—and conscious thought in general—because, for the authors' purposes, such lifelike complications would have made the results less interesting.

So it would appear what we're really testing here is a reflexive response to a very fast visual stimulus: an narrowly-constrained ability to produce snap reactions, not consciously process ambiguous information.

(So it may be that we're actually showing that liberals are better at rushing to quick decisions based on extremely small amounts of seemingly unambiguous information. ;-))

Also, it wasn't clear that this was a good measure of our habits, since the entire test (including the alleged new "habit" being taught) lasted less than 15 minutes. You can't inculcate a real-world "habit" (which might in any way correspond to political views) in 15 minutes.

5. An apolitical test? Though we are assured this experiment tests real-life, non-political decision-making, the experimenters happened to choose, in the starring role for this experiment, a single character which makes most extreme leftists see red: the dreaded W.

[Participants] were instructed to tap a keyboard when an M appeared on a computer monitor and to refrain from tapping when they saw a W. M appeared four times more frequently than W...

I could be wrong, but I laughed out loud when I read this! You have people wearing "W" pins, making "W" signs, and we all know the No-W bumper stickers -- and guess what character we pick as our odd-man-out, deserving a special response?

So, given these various caveats and potential shortfalls: Without re-running the experiment on the general populace, with more politically neutral symbols and a broader array of questions, what can we deduce for sure?

Not much, other than noting the editors at the LA Times, a high-visibility national publication, appears very interested in an apparently not-yet-replicated experiment by an associate prof at NYU which purports to show something undoubtedly rather dear to their hearts. No shock there, I suppose.

While I'm personally withholding judgment on the ultimate meaning or validity of this experiment (note that I'm supposed to be worse at dealing with ambiguity than the Times editors, who ran with it), I can offer several alternate explanations for these results.

Why might self-identified liberal students be more accurate at giving a split-second reaction to a "W" appearing on a TV screen?

We know that emotional conflicts activate certain centers in the brain. And apparently, the researchers did report these centers were more active in liberal participants' brains. In other words, a test of quick reactions allegedly made liberals more emotional than conservatives (almost the opposite of the stated conclusion) allegedly resulting in fewer mistakes in fast-reaction situations requiring little to no thought.

Alternative #1: Those who rated themselves as "liberal" or "very liberal" were probably more liberal that those in the general populace giving the same response -- and undoubtedly more politically active. If the game is "Zap the W" or "Avoid the W", they might have had a stronger motivation to pay close attention and try to do well.

Alternative #2: Perhaps generally hot-headed, easily angered, or otherwise quick-to-react people also tend to be attracted to liberal stances. (That would seem to match with the general tone of protest marches.)

Alternative #3: Video games (such as first-person shooters) may increase fast-reaction skills such as those tested here. It may be that a youth spent in front of a video game console tends to correlate with a more liberal worldview, as has been shown with high levels of television-watching.

Alternative #4: It may be that younger students are better at fast reactions, and also less likely to be or admit being conservative.

I'm not claiming any of these any of these are right either. (In a few, I'm just providing silly counterspin.) But I'd place higher odds on these possibilities, given that the Times and their experts weren't even able to correctly describe what was being measured. These suggestions at least correspond more closely to the kind of stimuli and mental processes involved.