Liberal/conservative traits

Given that regressives are still denying climate change, science, facts and so on I thought I'd reiterate the following:

The following is an excerpt from the book Reality Check which supports these studies:

“Mooney (2012) also describes research which shows that conservatives (especially modern Republicans) are particularly prone to deny scientific realities such as evolution or climate change. […] Conservatism also tends to be associated with a variety of other personalty traits, including dogmatism, intolerance of ambiguity and uncertainly, fear of death, fear of change, less openness to new experiences, less integrative complexity in their thinking, less nuanced thinking, more need for so-called closure, and so on. Liberals, on the other hand are characterized by some of the opposite personality traits: rejection of dogma, tolerance of ambiguity and uncertainly, less fear of death or change, more openness to new experience, curiosity about the world, and more complex and nuanced thinking without the need for simplicity or closure” (300).

One of the articles in the "these studies" link (#12):


"When faced with a conflict, liberals are more likely than conservatives to alter their habitual response when cues indicate it is necessary. Our results are consistent with the view that political orientation, in part, reflects individual differences in the functioning of a general mechanism related to cognitive control and self-regulation. Stronger conservatism (versus liberalism) was associated with less neurocognitive sensitivity to response conflicts. At the behavioral level, conservatives were also more likely to make errors of commission. Although a liberal orientation was associated with better performance on the response-inhibition task examined here, conservatives would presumably perform better on tasks in which a more fixed response style is optimal."

David M. Amodio, John T. Jost, Sarah L. Master, and Cindy M. Yee, "Neurocognitive Correlates of Liberalism and Conservatism," Nature Neuroscience, Sep. 9, 2007