Democrats and Republicans Both Adept at Ignoring Facts, Study Finds

[TrogL]

http://www.livescience.com/othernews/060124_political_decisions.html

Democrats and Republicans alike are adept at making decisions without letting the facts get in the way, a new study shows.

And they get quite a rush from ignoring information that's contrary to their point of view

...

"We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning," said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University. "What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts."

In the remainder of the article, they compare the process to addiction and personally I'd make the intuitive leap to comparing the process to that found by people in cults.

[wisteria]

1. It's called bullheadedness and the Republicans are more

likely to have the tendency to ignore fact and reason than Dem's are.

[Igel]

2. It'll be interesting to see if that's

substantiated by any hard data. One presumes they did this with a reasonable sample, and may even have statistics.

The thought of it.

[wryter2000]

3. I'd like to know which facts I'm ignoring

The fact that Bush's economy is good for everyone? The fact that he did his best to maintain the levees around NO? The fact that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons and was trying to get uranium? The fact that Bush has the right to wiretap without a warrant? Or, maybe, the fact that he always had a warrant when he conducted wiretaps? The fact that major combat operations in Iraq were over on 5/1/2003?

[rodeodance]

4. red blue green purple

[Marie26]

5. That's true

We all sort of tend to change the facts to fit our opinion; rather than changing our opinion to change the facts. It's easier that way.