George Carlin on Voting

I hadn’t seen this video before but it appeared on a blog as a tribute to Carlin after his demise. This shows he is even more cynical than myself on this subject! Caution: as is normal, his language is creative.

I do differ with him a bit; people who are NOT paying attention to current events should NOT vote. An uninformed voter is worse than not voting, IMO. And many people think it is someone else’s responsibility to teach them what is going on.

This is the real world, not school. We are all responsible for our own edification. Unfortunately, too many people connect with one easy source and let that shape their opinions (Fox News, Limbaugh, O’Reilly, CNN, Air America, etc.) leading to a one-sided view of the the world.

Thinking about what I just wrote makes me wonder if my original premise is worded correctly. Or is even true.

Many of today’s decisions are technical or technology driven: genetic research, stem cells, privacy issues, medical treatment/medical insurance, communications issues like frequency allotment and openness, and combat equipment are examples. Even our representatives cannot be experts in all these arenas (if they actually tried). So the expertise to make these decisions is outsourced to someone: corporate entities, independent experts, consultants, and lobbyists all qualify. The ordinary citizen, unless they have some personal contact with an area of technology, is left with no resources to provide input, even as a voter.

From Rockridge Nation, this bit is about preservation of the status quo. In our rapidly changing world, this becomes a significant factor in one’s political decision-making:

Preserving the Status Quo

There is a psychological tendency to reduce risk (or perceived risk) in all of us. This phenomenon is called the status quo bias. It is a feature of human behavior that progressives need to be aware of so that we are able to take it into consideration. Here’s how it works:

1. Uncertainty creates anxiety.
2. This makes situations that are more familiar – assumed to be more predictable – feel more appealing.
3. This introduces a bias toward maintaining the status quo.

Then, even more significant to political decisonmaking, is this research:

Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism

David M Amodio, John T Jost, Sarah L Master & Cindy M Yee

Political scientists and psychologists have noted that, on average, conservatives show more structured and persistent cognitive styles, whereas liberals are more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty. We tested the hypothesis that these profiles relate to differences in general neurocognitive functioning using event-related potentials, and found that greater liberalism was associated with stronger conflict-related anterior cingulate activity, suggesting greater neurocognitive sensitivity to cues for altering a habitual response pattern.

Which is more readable here:

Liberal Brain, Conservative Brain?

Posted on October 1, 2007

In a fascinating study published in Nature Neuroscience online entitled: Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism, David M. Amodio at NYU and others at UCLA found intriguing evidence that liberals and conservatives actually have differing brain function:

I was able to download the full study, which was a randomized study involving 43 right handed participants. (Left-handed people can have different functional brain activity.) During the study, half the participants were shown “W” or “M” images on a computer screen, and told to push a button if they saw a “W” and not push the button if they saw an “M”. They were shown an random pattern of “W”s and “M”s where “W”s outnumbered “M”s by about 4:1. Incorrect responses generated an error message. The other half of the participants were given opposite instructions, and the opposite pattern. The correct and incorrect responses were tallied, and it was found that those who had identified themselves as “strongly liberal” had a strong tendency to perform better on this test than those who identified themselves as “strongly conservative”. Also, the more “liberal” participants tended to have a higher degree of excitation in the dorsal anterior cingulate when presented with the less-frequent letter. This would suggest that liberals “noticed” the unusual letter more strongly than conservatives.

While the study is relatively small, the authors point out that there have been other studies which have begun to point out consistent differences in liberals and conservatives on behavioral tests.

I find this very interesting, because it suggests that differences between conservatives and liberals may not only be in how they interpret their environments, but also in how they perceive their environments based on neural functioning.

So can one say that liberals’ brains function better than conservatives’ brains? Well, the answer in not so clear cut. First of all, it is a single study, and will need to be replicated to confirm the findings. Secondly, there was variation: Some liberals did fairly poorly on this test, some conservatives did fairly well. And finally, the trait of enhanced recognition of “unusual” stimulus may or may not be survival enhancing, depending on the circumstance. Sometimes its better to ignore the exception, at least for the time being (”The show must go on!”), and other times its important to pay careful attention to exceptions (”Stop the presses!”).

And the LA Times article on this subject has more comments from other experts if you wanna pursue this:
Study finds left-wing brain, right-wing brain
Even in humdrum nonpolitical decisions, liberals and conservatives literally think differently, researchers show.

So maybe George Carlin had a point: not voting is as good a system as any. Especially since the elected decision-makers are more beholden to political donors to get reelected than to voters who elect them.

So ignore this entire post.