The neuroscience behind conservative stupidity

  • Thread starter Thread starter TheGreatGreen
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What a faggot this goat ass eater is. No wonder why Inbred Beta PhoneyIommi loves him so much. @TheGreatGreenNewDeal most likely wants to blow him as well. Beta male lib cucks are the absolute worst, you know who you are. :ROFLMAO:

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MadAsAHatter said:
@TheGreatGreen

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you actually want to have a genuine discussion on the topic.

I can't remember if the dude in the video referenced a particular study and I'm not going to watch the video again. I'm assuming his talking points are based on Kanai et al since that's what lines up the most. There is an issue with that study. It uses a very small and low political diverse sample size. Therefore the conclusions of that study are weak at best.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589004224017577

I urge you to read this study which builds on Kanai et al by using a larger and more politically diverse sample size. They actually sampled Dutch since their political structure covers a broader spectrum.

A couple of key points from the study:
  • There is a weak correlation between ideology and brain structure; i.e. the effects are very small.
  • There is a stronger link to the left and right fusiform gyri with ideology.
  • There is very low predictive power for political ideology on the basis of brain structure.
  • Evidence suggests there is a reflection of political ideology on the basis of functional rather than structural properties.
  • Findings suggest tat there is a more nuanced correlation of brain function/structure than the simplified assumption that brain structure is different.
  • Results of this and other studies are inconclusive on correlation between brain structure and political ideology. Further, the construct of political ideology is ill defined and involve a multitude of factors. More research is needed to draw conclusions on relationships.

Here are some passages from the study related to the key point that I feel are important.

Our findings suggest that a more nuanced operationalization of ideology is needed, compared to the oversimplified notion that liberals and conservatives have fundamentally different brains. While we do observe neurobiological differences in gray matter, it is critical to approach these findings with caution, to avoid fostering misconceptions and stereotypes, which can inadvertently fuel social polarization and undermine democratic participation and egalitarian values.

We deem it possible that a small anatomical variation in the amygdala may link to substantial variance in functional orchestration and neural connectivity, accounting for some of the measurable differences at the level of political conservatism across individuals. However, we must not forget that the precise functions of the amygdala’s subnuclei and their role in fear learning remain elusive.19 Because of the correlational nature of neuroimaging studies, it remains unresolved if the association between amygdala volume and conservatism identified in the Kanai et al.6 study supports a causal role of the amygdala in regulating conservatism.

Confirmatory tests link the left and right fusiform gyri with ideology
This suggests a sophisticated neural basis for political attitudes, rooted in how the FG [fusiform gyri] integrates and interprets complex visual input bearing social significance. This prediction should be addressed further in future studies, using functional neuroimaging methods such as EEG or fMRI, in order to avoid interpretations based on reverse inference.

In our study, we find inconsistent evidence that gray matter volume in the ACC correlates with conservatism. Results from the exploratory and the preregistered confirmatory sections of our data do not align. Although our study was sufficiently powered, we still fail to replicate this relationship.

it is possible that differences between liberals and conservative spotted in the ACC can reflect functional instead of structural properties.

Because all these regions are involved in a diverse array of cognitive functions, associations with ideology should be regarded with caution and call for further investigation. In our whole-brain analysis, we did not find relationships between these areas and the different ideology concepts we tested for.
Click to expand...

That's a lot of work for one post. Is this AI? Did you put the article into chatgpt and have it spit our a rebuttal? :D

Ah just messing with you. I don't think the exact study was cited in the video. There is an older study that found this to be the case with a relatively small sample size like you mention, but a recent one from Oct 2024 was much larger, the sample size was 928 people, and reached the same conclusion. Larger amygdala sizes in conservatives on average.

https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(24)01757-7

Key findings:

"In all, the implication of the amygdala specifically in predicting political orientations seems a consistent finding across multiple studies. The current replication study using a fairly large and politically diverse dataset adds partial support to this hypothesis. Our results imply that a progressive voter has on average an amygdala volume 0.14 standard deviation units smaller than a conservative voter does (we compare here the difference between one standard deviation below the social identity scale to one standard deviation above). This translates to 10 mm3 in physical space, which is just a little bit larger than a sesame seed. Of course, such a difference in the amygdala corresponds to thousands of neurons, possibly adding up to millions of neural synapses. We deem it possible that a small anatomical variation in the amygdala may link to substantial variance in functional orchestration and neural connectivity, accounting for some of the measurable differences at the level of political conservatism across individuals."


To be completely fair though, I don't think it's conclusive that a person with a larger amygdala is necessarily less able to absorb, synthesize, and/or recall information than someone with a smaller amygdala. The main suggestion is that the person with the larger amygdala is going to have a brain that reacts more intensely and viscerally to fear, rage, and disgust responses, and those impulses are more often going to override the more rational parts of the brain, and that the people in which this occurs are statistically more likely to be conservative.

Obviously this doesn't mean every conservative is more negatively emotionally driven than every liberal. But those are the findings on average. Practically speaking though, just watch any of the most extremely conservative targeting media outlets. Every single one of them capitalizes on fear, outrage, loyalty to authority, being a member of the in-group. Liberal news agencies have started doing the same thing since Trump was elected the first time, but Fox News and the like have been doing it since the first day they went live. And conservatives eat. that. shit. up. Can't get enough of it. They thrive on being told they're the real persecuted victims, that they deserve better and would have better lives if only for the [chosen minority group to hate of the current political climate], etc.

Personally speaking, no, I do not think every conservative is an idiot. There are plenty of highly intelligent conservatives. I'm friends with quite a few of them, and they're way more fun to party with than liberals, btw. I do however think everybody who calls themselves a member of MAGA is more or less off their rocker, or they’re some conman looking to fleece the true believers.
 
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TheGreatGreen said:
That's a lot of work for one post. Is this AI? Did you put the article into chatgpt and have it spit our a rebuttal? :D

Ah just messing with you. I don't think the exact study was cited in the video. There is an older study that found this to be the case with a relatively small sample size like you mention, but a recent one from Oct 2024 was much larger, the sample size was 928 people, and reached the same conclusion. Larger amygdala sizes in conservatives on average.

https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(24)01757-7

Key findings:

"In all, the implication of the amygdala specifically in predicting political orientations seems a consistent finding across multiple studies. The current replication study using a fairly large and politically diverse dataset adds partial support to this hypothesis. Our results imply that a progressive voter has on average an amygdala volume 0.14 standard deviation units smaller than a conservative voter does (we compare here the difference between one standard deviation below the social identity scale to one standard deviation above). This translates to 10 mm3 in physical space, which is just a little bit larger than a sesame seed. Of course, such a difference in the amygdala corresponds to thousands of neurons, possibly adding up to millions of neural synapses. We deem it possible that a small anatomical variation in the amygdala may link to substantial variance in functional orchestration and neural connectivity, accounting for some of the measurable differences at the level of political conservatism across individuals."


To be completely fair though, I don't think it's conclusive that a person with a larger amygdala is necessarily less able to absorb, synthesize, and/or recall information than someone with a smaller amygdala. The main suggestion is that the person with the larger amygdala is going to have a brain that reacts more intensely and viscerally to fear, rage, and disgust responses, and those impulses are more often going to override the more rational parts of the brain.

Obviously this doesn't mean every conservative is more negatively emotionally driven than every liberal. But those are the findings on average. Practically speaking though, just watch any of the most extremely conservative targeting media outlets. Every single one of them capitalizes on fear, outrage, loyalty to authority, being a member of the in-group. Liberal news agencies have started doing the same thing since Trump was elected the first time, but Fox News and the like have been doing it since the first day they went live. And conservatives eat. that. shit. up. Can't get enough of it. They thrive on being told they're the real persecuted victims, that they deserve better and would have better lives if only for the [chosen minority group to hate of the current political climate], etc.

Personally speaking, no, I do not think every conservative is an idiot. There are plenty of highly intelligent conservatives. I'm friends with quite a few of them, and they're way more fun to party with than liberals, btw. I do however think everybody who calls themselves a member of MAGA is more or less either an idiot or someone who is looking to fleece the idiot true believers.
Click to expand...
Exactly. I have lots of conservative friends. It's like John Stuart Mill said,
"Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives...
I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it."
 
JDs Couch said:
Exactly. I have lots of conservative friends. It's like John Stuart Mill said,
"Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives...
I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it."
Click to expand...
Says the dumbest piece of shit here.
 
Intelligence has many factors, and there are different types of intelligence.
 
TheGreatGreen said:
That's a lot of work for one post. Is this AI? Did you put the article into chatgpt and have it spit our a rebuttal? :D

Ah just messing with you. I don't think the exact study was cited in the video. There is an older study that found this to be the case with a relatively small sample size like you mention, but a recent one from Oct 2024 was much larger, the sample size was 928 people, and reached the same conclusion. Larger amygdala sizes in conservatives on average.

https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(24)01757-7

Key findings:

"In all, the implication of the amygdala specifically in predicting political orientations seems a consistent finding across multiple studies. The current replication study using a fairly large and politically diverse dataset adds partial support to this hypothesis. Our results imply that a progressive voter has on average an amygdala volume 0.14 standard deviation units smaller than a conservative voter does (we compare here the difference between one standard deviation below the social identity scale to one standard deviation above). This translates to 10 mm3 in physical space, which is just a little bit larger than a sesame seed. Of course, such a difference in the amygdala corresponds to thousands of neurons, possibly adding up to millions of neural synapses. We deem it possible that a small anatomical variation in the amygdala may link to substantial variance in functional orchestration and neural connectivity, accounting for some of the measurable differences at the level of political conservatism across individuals."


To be completely fair though, I don't think it's conclusive that a person with a larger amygdala is necessarily less able to absorb, synthesize, and/or recall information than someone with a smaller amygdala. The main suggestion is that the person with the larger amygdala is going to have a brain that reacts more intensely and viscerally to fear, rage, and disgust responses, and those impulses are more often going to override the more rational parts of the brain, and that the people in which this occurs are statistically more likely to be conservative.

Obviously this doesn't mean every conservative is more negatively emotionally driven than every liberal. But those are the findings on average. Practically speaking though, just watch any of the most extremely conservative targeting media outlets. Every single one of them capitalizes on fear, outrage, loyalty to authority, being a member of the in-group. Liberal news agencies have started doing the same thing since Trump was elected the first time, but Fox News and the like have been doing it since the first day they went live. And conservatives eat. that. shit. up. Can't get enough of it. They thrive on being told they're the real persecuted victims, that they deserve better and would have better lives if only for the [chosen minority group to hate of the current political climate], etc.

Personally speaking, no, I do not think every conservative is an idiot. There are plenty of highly intelligent conservatives. I'm friends with quite a few of them, and they're way more fun to party with than liberals, btw. I do however think everybody who calls themselves a member of MAGA is more or less off their rocker, or they’re some conman looking to fleece the true believers.
Click to expand...
This is the same paper from 2024 that I linked to and referenced. The older study is Kanai et al from 2011 which this 2024 study was built on.

The piece you referenced is in the Discussion section under Ideology and the amygdala and is only part of the study and conclusions. The rest of that paragraph states:

However, we must not forget that the precise functions of the amygdala’s subnuclei and their role in fear learning remain elusive.19 Because of the correlational nature of neuroimaging studies, it remains unresolved if the association between amygdala volume and conservatism identified in the Kanai et al.6 study supports a causal role of the amygdala in regulating conservatism. In the pursuit of understanding the neural underpinnings of political ideology; we argue that future research in political neuroscience needs to shift toward functional connectivity of the amygdala and its subnuclei with other brain areas relevant for political conservatism."

Which is part of the key takeaways that I listed; There's a weak correlation between ideology and size/structure and ideology has a stronger correlation to brain function. This leaves the association between the size of the amygdala and political ideology unresolved at best. The researchers suggested further studies should focus more on functions of areas of the brain instead.

The next two sections which involved a whole brain study further supports this finding:
There is a stronger link between the left & right FG to ideology tying it to how visual cues are interpreted and how that integrates with higher level brain functions.
When looking at the ACC this study had conflicting results with the original Kanai et al concerning grey matter volume. This study failed to replicate the original results. Again this study suggested to focus on functionality of regions of the brain over size and structure. Their results backed by another study Yang et al suggests a stronger link between function to ideology over size & structure.

"Because all these regions are involved in a diverse array of cognitive functions, associations with ideology should be regarded with caution and call for further investigation. In our whole-brain analysis, we did not find relationships between these areas and the different ideology concepts we tested for."

Essentially this is saying that ideology is formed by a complex neural network across multiple areas of the brain and can't be pinpointed to one specific location. This further reinforces the hypothesis that ideology is better linked to brain function over structure

While drawing no positive conclusions, the study closes with the final thoughts that political ideology can be broken into two perspectives

"(1) be deducted to morphological differences in a small set of brain regions, implying that an independent module or network with its own domain-specific functions and properties determines political orientations or (2) be attributed to functional connectivity networks, implying that ideological beliefs are emergent mental constructs that arise from the dynamic interplay between low-level feature processing and higher-order cognitive operations relevant for social categorization, identification, and valuation"

My opinion; based on this and other studies, the latter perspective would be the most likely to show correlations to political ideology. Meaning that ideology is tied to several areas of the brain and how they interact across a larger neural network.

In either case, there are not sufficient studies confirming any results to form positive conclusions. As this paper suggest, further studies focusing on functions and interactions over structure should be conducted. Also to be cautious of results that focus on a single area as evidence suggests more complex interactions between several areas of the brain.

Edit: I also wanted to point out that this study sampled Dutch peoples because they have a broader spectrum of political ideology. While this approach works well in theory it still is a limited and somewhat flawed sample size. I say that meaning political ideology is ill defined and different nations have different views on what constitutes conservatism and liberalism. So this study can be applied better to specifically the Dutch, but loses some of its meaning when applied to other nations' people.

A better approach would be to more specifically define conservative vs. liberal based on a multitude of national political ideologies. Or compare & contrast multiple studies using the same parameters from different nations and how they define each ideology.
 
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JDs Couch said:
Very true.
Click to expand...
But what we do know is that you possess none that is tangible or is in the slightest useful.

Given your social intercourse standards, were you dropped on your head as a child or did your mother drink to excess whilst pregnant?

There's got to be a logical reason you're so damaged whereby you hate yourself and those all around you.

I mean, sheep don't even want to have sex with you even though you believe they do. When sheep bleat it doesn't actually mean come and bang me JD.

Having a love affair with one of your alts here doesn't mean you're normal, quite the opposite and quite foul.

Have you considered a Go Fund Me appeal to fund your psychiatric care costs? If not, I urge you to register today for our sake because you're a sheep fucking nuisance of the highest order.

In the meantime, take you and your alts and go chase down some goats, maybe they'll make better sex partners for you all. :ROFLMAO: (y)
 
NoHassle said:
But what we do know is that you possess none that is tangible or is in the slightest useful.

Given your social intercourse standards, were you dropped on your head as a child or did your mother drink to excess whilst pregnant?

There's got to be a logical reason you're so damaged whereby you hate yourself and those all around you.

I mean, sheep don't even want to have sex with you even though you believe they do. When sheep bleat it doesn't actually mean come and bang me JD.

Having a love affair with one of your alts here doesn't mean you're normal, quite the opposite and quite foul.

Have you considered a Go Fund Me appeal to fund your psychiatric care costs? If not, I urge you to register today for our sake because you're a sheep fucking nuisance of the highest order.

In the meantime, take you and your alts and go chase down some goats, maybe they'll make better sex partners for you all. :ROFLMAO: (y)
Click to expand...
TL/DR
 
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