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| Unconscious influence on political decisions; and the scientific method | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Jun 24 2006, 12:12 PM (1,206 Views) | |
| Derek | Jun 24 2006, 12:12 PM Post #1 |
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This was something I'd heard about before, but an article in the July 2006 Issue of Scientific American related it in a way I hadn't explicitly noted. In politically-minded people of any particular group, the brain undergoes a strange process when making political decisions. Rather than primarily using the areas of the brain associated with reason and logic, they use the areas associated with emotion and positive feedback. Rather than reasoning through all the evidence, then, they go in with the conclusion they want (that of their associated party of belief structure) and find data to fit it (ignoring data that doesn't). This is not new; part of the idea of this group is to try to rely on logic and reason as much as possible, and ideally to have people from different backgrounds, partly so that we can cover as much ground as possible in seeking the best solution, and partly to call each other out when we're not careful about our facts. This article in particular (it was an editorial) suggested that politics take on the same peer-review process as science. In a way, we come close, but we're not nearly so rigorous and we don't have nearly the people to do it as well. I think it'd be great to see this kind of scrutiny in political circles, so long as it actually uses reason constructively and isn't just the smear tactics we often see in political debates. |
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9:24 AM Jul 11