It is very typical for such kind of paper using only the American political system and with a brief overview the authors arent aware of that flaw (also very typical)<p>It might be at least interesting to see the hypothesis tested in a multi - party - system or countries with a less polarised society. Even similar polarised countries might be an interesting study subject as an parallel experiment..
I'm extremely skeptical of anything that stereotypes like this. Let's see if this holds up, my money's on it turning out to be a kind of phrenology
There’s an old Arabic philosophy that also suggests facial similarities between people that share similar thinking, or more like your facial features will develop according to your personality traits so eventually your look will converge to your likeminded. The theory goes further by classifying these looks into the closest animal and the traits from that animal.
Yet another reason to discount the philosophical concept of free will. We are all born with genes we didn’t choose and raised by people we didn’t choose in environments we didn’t choose… and any ‘choices’ we make thereafter are heavily influenced by those factors, all of which were completely out of our control.
This is a very important part:<p>> It is important to note that throughout our analyses, the topic of immigration elicited the strongest polarized response. That these effects did not extend to the other political topics is likely the result of the political climate at the time of data collection, which took place at the beginning of 2019, only a few months after D. Trump introduced the Build the Wall, Enforce the Law Act.<p>So it doesn't seem that there is a difference in general, just that the climate then created a very different environment for the sides. They didn't find such differences on abortion or black lives matter, its just immigration in a very special time.
This may be linked to the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (?)<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity</a>
Prior to reading the article, I had a mental model of a joke headline “scientists find people who think alike think alike”.<p>But as others say here, using binary US politics in this kind of research makes little sense.
> Through targeted online and field recruiting (N = 360), we invited 44 participants (equally split among liberals and conservatives) to participate in a study on political cognition<p>And thats your problem with science. We dont know how old these people are, we dont know the selection process, ie were they all recruited down the local Masonic Lodge, or at a University, or at a Church.<p>More data is needed on the recruitment processes in order to eliminate any selection or manipulation bias, otherwise am I watching a scientific magic show?<p>We dont know if these people are Early Adopters on the Everett Rogers Diffusion of innovations curve.<p>It might be better to title this study, fMRI used to map Social Conformity as studied by people like Solomon Asch or fMRI used to map Authority to Obedience as studied by people like Stanley Milgram and more recently Phillip Zimbardo, where the idea's/ideology are the authority.<p>Would that be fair?
An obtuse study (and obtusely written article) that concludes truisms: birds of a feather; people preferring to congregate with others of similar interests.
The study purports to document physical characteristics in Republican and Democratic brains related to the good vibes associated with preaching to the choir.
What does this imply for the following state (of mind), if it had basis in reality?<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology</a>