Thread:User talk:WaitingforGodot/Political neuroscience

Don't get too excited over said claptrap. In my not-so-humble opinion, these kinds of studies aren't worth a whole lot at the moment. Brain scans really just create an additional layer of complication -- political orientation -> brain structure -> emotion/personality trait abstraction. The second point is the weak link in the chain because these studies tend to rely on very simplistic interpretations of the roles of brain structures (and their press releases even more so). Not so great when you're already trying to connect two rather fuzzily defined things, and political orientation is often reported in a binary "left/right" fashion. It's far better to have a solid and consistent psychological model lacking a neural component than a crap one that incorporates a neural component. The research on the five factor model/OCEAN and political orientation seems fairly robust (but still a bit of a rough sketch). But the MRI studies I see little use in -- don't get me wrong, it's nice to have the data and it will probably be useful in the future, I just don't think we can say it really means anything right now. Admittedly, the intellectual masturbation over this stuff is largely coming from the media, but sometimes I get the feeling that some of the researchers putting this stuff out know it will be trumpeted by pundits and are hoping to get some hype. The new phrenology indeed.