Left-brained: Study suggests conservative Democrats don’t compute for liberal voters

By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at NewsRx Law -- Political partisans would like you to believe voters’ heads will explode if faced with candidates crossing party lines on key policies - a Democrat who opposes abortion, say, or a Republican who supports gun control.

In a new study, University of Nebraska-Lincoln researchers found that self-identified liberals were more likely to notice when candidates deviated from the party line. Liberals also tended to take longer to react to inconsistent positions from Democrats. And in the majority of instances, they evaluated those inconsistent positions as “bad.”

The study used a powerful functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging machine at the university’s Center for Brain, Biology and Behavior to observe what happens inside the brain when people are faced with “incongruent” policy positions from their party’s candidates. The researchers used the scanner to see if certain areas of the brain activate when people evaluate candidates’ stances on a range of issues.

Participants were asked to review made-up candidates’ positions on dozens of issues, then decide within milliseconds whether …

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(2017-11-30), Left-brained: Study suggests conservative Democrats don’t compute for liberal voters, NewsRx Law, 89, ISSN: 0000-0000, BUTTER® ID: 014742302