Author: Glenn Hauman

Political bias affects brain activity, study finds:

Democrats and Republicans alike are adept at making decisions without letting the facts get in the way, a new study shows.

And they get quite a rush from ignoring information that’s contrary to their point of view.

Researchers asked staunch party members from both sides to evaluate information that threatened their preferred candidate prior to the 2004 Presidential election. The subjects’ brains were monitored while they pondered.

The results were announced today.

“We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning,” said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University. “What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts.”

Bias on both sides

The test subjects on both sides of the political aisle reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted, Westen and his colleagues say.

Then, with their minds made up, brain activity ceased in the areas that deal with negative emotions such as disgust. But activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix, Westen explained.

The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making.

“None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged,” Westen said. “Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones.”

Notably absent were any increases in activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most associated with reasoning.

Man, I really have to write that post that tries to tie all this together. There’s a war for your mind and emotions every single day of your life, and it’s getting harder and harder to remain on the sidelines.

Republicans committed vote fraud in their own internal election for House Majority Leader.

And people wonder why some folks think that Presidential elections got stolen? I mean, these are the leading Republicans in the country, and they can’t even manage their own elections, where everybody knows each other.

Unreal and just sad.

Why View From Above? Because I’m pretty dang tall, 6’6.

Fine, but why does that mean you should listen to me? Well, there’s this:

Tall men get better education – Science – MSNBC.com:

Swedish study: 6-foot-4 and taller are higher achievers

STOCKHOLM – A study of 950,000 Swedish men has shown that taller men get a better education, a researcher said on Wednesday.

The study, to be published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, could suggest short people are discriminated against as they are expected to be low achievers, said researcher Finn Rasmussen at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute.

“The probability of achieving higher education in later life increases linearly with height,” said the study.

It looked at male conscripts into the Swedish army born between 1950 and 1975 and their education for up to 27 years after their height was measured at the age of 18.

“Men taller than 194 centimeters (6-foot-4) were two to three times more likely to obtain a higher education when compared with men shorter than 165 centimeters,” it added.

Feeding variables into the study such as social background or intelligence as measured by IQ altered the outcome slightly, but a clear link between height and educational attainment remained, the research said.

The scientists did not draw conclusions, but Rasmussen said it could be something to do with social attitudes.

“We do not know if people have negative attitudes to short people. It is possible that there could something in society about the expectations of people or attitudes to what people can perform,” he told Reuters.

But really, some of my best friends are short people. (Like I have options.)

If the State of the Union is so strong, how is it that it can’t stand against women wearing t-shirts in the balcony?

Somehow, I am reminded of being scolded for putting pennies on the railroad tracks when I was a kid, being told it was a danger for the trains, which could be derailed. This scared me more than anything– there were miles of railroad tracks where people could put pennies, and that could cause the entire thing to fly apart? You couldn’t pay me enough to ride on a train if that was true.

The same thing applies here.

David Mack gets interviewed here about writing for Trek. And oddly enough, I’m mentioned in passing, although I was going to link to it anyway before I read it and saw my name. (Really, who do you think I am, Mark Evanier?)

One day, I shall tell the true story of how Dave and John Ordover met…

(Via Trek Today.)

I met her a few years back at Lynne Thigpen’s combination birthday/Hannakwanzaamas shindig. (Lynne won the Tony appearing in Wendy’s An American Daughter, coming on stage drenched head to toe.) Everybody was supposed to bring an ornament for the tree– I brought a talking Darth Vader ornament, since Lynne had done numerous shows with James Earl Jones.

Wendy didn’t bring an ornament. Quickly improvising, she reached into her handbag and pulled out an empty prescription bottle for Valium. She poked a hole in the lid, put a hook through it and hung it from the tree.

A one-of-a-kind ornament from a one-of-a-kind lady. Selah.

How long will it take GWB to reference September 11 in tonight’s State of the Union address? I’m taking 13 minutes in the pool, and putting the over/under mark at 17:40.

TIME.com: Verbatim – Mullah Naqibullah Jan. 9 – Jan. 15, 2006:

And there are so many ways to kill off educated people.

Would You Take the Bird in the Hand, or a 75% Chance at the Two in the Bush? – New York Times:

WOULD you rather have $1,000 for sure or a 90 percent chance of $5,000? A guaranteed $1,000 or a 75 percent chance of $4,000?

In economic theory, questions like these have no right or wrong answers. Even if a gamble is mathematically more valuable — a 75 percent chance of $4,000 has an expected value of $3,000, for instance — someone may still prefer a sure thing.

People have different tastes for risk, just as they have different tastes for ice cream or paint colors. The same is true for waiting: Would you rather have $400 now or $100 every year for 10 years? How about $3,400 this month or $3,800 next month? Different people will answer differently.

Economists generally accept those differences without further explanation, while decision researchers tend to focus on average behavior.

In decision research, individual differences “are regarded as a nuisance — as just another source of ‘unexplained’ variance,” Shane Frederick, a management science professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote in “Cognitive Reflection and Decision Making.” The article is published in the Fall 2005 issue of The Journal of Economic Perspectives, which includes a special section of articles devoted to “cognition, brain science and economics.” (The article is available at mit.edu/people/shanefre/ publications.htm.)

Professor Frederick discovered striking systematic patterns in how people answer questions about risk and patience, including those above. This short problem-solving test, he found, predicts a lot:

1) A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

2) If it takes five machines five minutes to make five widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?

3) In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half the lake?

The test measures not just the ability to solve math problems but the willingness to reflect on and check your answers. (Scores have a 0.44 correlation with math SAT scores, where 1.00 would be exact.) The questions all have intuitive answers — wrong ones.

Professor Frederick gave his “cognitive reflection test” to nearly 3,500 respondents, mostly students at universities including M.I.T., the University of Michigan and Bowling Green University. Participants also answered a survey about how they would choose between various financial payoffs, as well as time-oriented questions like how much they would pay to get a book delivered overnight.

Getting the math problems right predicts nothing about most tastes, including whether someone prefers apples or oranges, Coke or Pepsi, rap music or ballet. But high scorers — those who get all the questions right — do prefer taking risks.

“Even when it actually hurts you on average to take the gamble, the smart people, the high-scoring people, actually like it more,” Professor Frederick said in an interview. Almost a third of high scorers preferred a 1 percent chance of $5,000 to a sure $60.

They are also more patient, particularly when the difference, and the implied interest rate, is large. Choosing $3,400 this month over $3,800 next month implies an annual discount rate of 280 percent. Yet only 35 percent of low scorers — those who missed every question — said they would wait, while 60 percent of high scorers preferred the later, bigger payoff.

Men and women also show different results. “Expressed loosely,” he writes, “being smart makes women patient and makes men take more risks.”

High-scoring women show slightly more willingness to wait than high-scoring men, while the differences in risk-taking are much larger. High-scoring women are about as willing to gamble as low-scoring men, while low-scoring women are even more risk-averse

For instance, 80 percent of high-scoring men would pick a 15 percent chance of $1 million over a sure $500, compared with only 38 percent of high-scoring women, 40 percent of low-scoring men and 25 percent of low-scoring women.

The connection between cognition and risk preferences challenges some of the “prospect theory” developed from the pioneering work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. They observed that people would accept larger risks to avoid losses than to achieve gains, even when the two choices were mathematically equivalent. The same person might take a sure $100 instead of a 50 percent chance of $300, yet prefer a 50 percent chance of losing $300 rather than a sure $100 loss.

This result, which has implications for investment and insurance, is one of the major findings of behavioral economics. Although prospect theory “is spectacularly true” for the low-scoring group, Professor Frederick writes, high scorers treat potential gains and potential losses about the same.

For the record, I got all three right immediately. No shock there that I’m a risk taker; I’m a noted serial entrepreneur.

If you liked Scott Card’s comments against homosexuality, you’ll love his comments supporting intelligent design. (Which brings up the immediate question: why would an intelligent designer allow for what Card believes is an obvious design flaw?)

Pharyngula has already done the work of ripping him to shreds over it. Go read.