Anyone drawing conclusions from this study is demonstrating a lack of critical thinking on a level that scares me.
1 - They asked people to self identify their political leanings. There's a highly empirical gauge!
2 - Extremely low sample size, and based mostly in the university world.
3 - well, the study explains this:
Quote:
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“Lead author David Amodio […] cautioned that the study looked at a narrow range of human behavior and that it would be a mistake to conclude that one political orientation was better. The tendency of conservatives to block distracting information could be a good thing depending on the situation, he said.”
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The ability to filter information enables one to definitively act in response. In many situations, that is more important then understanding things from all angles. To attempt that liberals are generally smarter then conservatives only demonstrates an arrogance born of ignorance.
In no way does this study indicate that one side is smarter then the other. All it does is demonstrate that some people are more open to new ideas because their brains react differently when receiving and processing information. It then tries to loosely correlate this with political affiliation to see if there might be something worth investigating. Without seeing the actual study, it seems like there may be something to this, but I highly doubt it has anything to do with intelligence.
It would be interesting to see the results of this study include general IQ and EQ numbers for each member of the sample group.