Paper: "The Psychological Dispositions of Self-Identified Libertarians"

[Rynn]

I was watching a documentary last night, reporting on recent work about the risk-processing strategies of "liberals" in today's society as opposed to people of a more conservative bent. Apparently, the part of the brain most involved in deciding whether to take a risk is different between the two groups.

Ergh, reports like this are the bane of a lot of neuroscientists (different kind of biologist myself but I know a few). You can find a huge amount of biological correlations with all sorts of phenomenon, but it's often presented as though it's a strong causal link. It's like how the news went through a spate about a decade ago of reporting "crime genes" when in reality all that had been shown was a slim correlation with one gene in a small prison population. Literally could have been anything but it perpetuated a round of speculation that people could be genotyped for criminality. Never mind that the reasons for crime are hugely nuanced and crimes are very much social constructs (would homosexual people have possessed "crime genes" back then homosexuality was illegal).