----- Original Message ----- > On Mon, 10 Sep 2007. Ken Steele wrote: > > http://tinyurl.com/3yvxlm
It is possible that I am just behind the times or out of touch with what is interesting in the research coming from various areas of neuroscience but I do get annoyed reading popular media accounts (or even some of the journal articles) such as that presented in the news story linked to above. Just a couple of points to keep in mind when reading the story: (1) The researchers make the assumption that there is a unidimensional scale which runs from "conservative" at one end to "liberal" at the other end. This type of "model" of political "stance" may be tempting because, as students of S.S. Stevens would know, we rely upon an internal scale of magnitude which allows us to arbitrarily assign different degrees of magnitude to different discrete entities which may embody different qualitative properties (e.g., in giving magnitude estimates of severity of crime, some might rate/generate larger estimates for, say, rape, relative to physical assualt but there are likely to be differences amongs different groups, such as whether males and females have ever been assaulted or raped). A unidimensional scale for liberalism-conservatism ignores important differences among groups initially may be thought of similar (e.g., both economic conservatives and social conservatives may be thought of as being highly similar but libertarians probably don't see that they have much in common with Christian conservatives, especially when it comes to issues of having laws restricting gambling, drug use, abortion, etc. -- their commonality may actually be based on their dislike/distrust of liberal democrats use of the federal government [e.g., restricting gun ownership] which is different from basing differences in magnitude on a unidimensional scale of liberalism and conservatism). I would suggest looking at John Dean's "Conservatives Without Conscience" to appreciate how many different types of conservatives there are and some of the reasons why this is the case (e.g., there are no "canonical" documents that all conservatives can point to as the basis for their political beliefs while liberals can reference to the U.S. Declaration of Independence and other political documents that assert the equality of all peoples and the rights that all people are entitled to). One has to ask, what does a correlation between a unidimensional scale like conservatism- liberalism to any other variable mean when the actual variable (i.e., conservatism-liberalism) may be multidimensiona?. Sidenote: Bob Altemeyer's Authoritarianism Scale is presented as being unidimensional but consisting of three "subareas" which Altemeyer has "mixed together" in the items of his scale. Others, such as Funke (2005; Political Psychology, 26(2), 195-218) have revised Altemeyer's scale to disentangle the three subareas have has found that a correlated three factor model (one factor for each subarea) is a better description than a single factor model, as predicted by Altermeyer's theory and research. Although a single factor model is simpler to understand, it may be an oversimplication that obscures potentialy interesting differences among groups. One might make the same argument regarding a unidimensional conservative-liberal scale. (2) I wonder if people, especially Ph.D. and M.D. types are more likely to confuse CORRELATIONAL relationships with CAUSAL relationships if the correlational relationship involves neurologically based variables? For example, if there is a correlation, say, between scores on a unidimensional conservatism-liberal scale and activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, (ACC) which of the following statements is correct: (a) holding a conservative or liberal belief determines the level of activity in the ACC? (b) level of activity in the ACC determines whether one holds a conservative or liberal belief (c) the observed correlations between conservatism-liberalism score and ACC activity to due to some third variable, possibly cognitive, neural, social, experiential, etc., that was not controlled in the experiment. (d) there is insufficient information provided to allow one to develop a coherent explanation without making ad hoc, post hoc speculations which were not tested by the presented research. I'm not sure sure which answer above is really correct though I do lean towards (d). I would also like to suggest a research project for anyone who is interested in such issues or may have students who are interested in such interests: Construct vignettes where two variables X and Y have either correlational or causal relationships and then "frame" these in neuroscience and non-neuroscience situations. So, the deep structure of the problem is determining whether the presented relationship is correlational or causal but the surface form of the problem is a neuroscience context vs. a non-neuroscience context (it should fairly easy to construct the 2x2 table for this design). It could be just me but I have the feeling that people, ranging from the proverbial "man on the street" to undergraduates to professional researchers may call correlational relationships causal when presented in a neuroscience frame relative to the correlational relationship being presented in a non-neuroscience framework. I would be interested in seeing the results of such research because it is my impression that correlations in neuroscience, as described above, are more readily interpreted as causal in nature though I'm not really sure why (is this due to the way neuroscientists present their results, does having a neuroscience/biological frame bias one towards asserting causal relationship, etc.). Anyway, I guess the most useful bottom line statement is that everyone should maintain some skepticism about popular media presentations of psychology. Remember Freud and the iceberg metaphor. -Mike Palij New York Univeristy [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
