A study, based on a rapid response test and recently published in Nature Neuroscience, says conservatives were “more likely to make errors of commission,” whereas “stronger liberalism was correlated with greater accuracy.” It concludes that “a more conservative orientation is related to greater persistence in a habitual response pattern, despite signals that this response pattern should change.”

Willliam Saletan, writing in Slate and addressing the study’s authors, convincingly rebuts their modus operandi:

· Tapping a keyboard [the basis for the study] is a way of thinking? Come on. You can make a case for conservative inflexibility, but not with this study.

· [C]omplexity and ambiguity weren’t tested; they were excluded. The study was designed to prevent them—and conscious thought in general—because, for the authors’ purposes, such lifelike complications would have made the results less interesting. Personally, I’d be more interested in a study that invited such complications—examining, for instance, whether conservatives, having resisted doubts about the wisdom of the status quo, are more likely than liberals to doubt the wisdom of change.

· [If] you studied [conservatives] in real life, you’d find that while we second-guess the status quo less than you do, we second-guess putative reforms more than you do.

· Also, our standard of “information” is a bit tougher than the blips and fads you fall for…[O]ver the long run, [these inclinations have] served us and society pretty well. It’s just that you notice all the times we were wrong and ignore all the times we were right.

Saletan concludes that the study is “a tiny world of letters, half-seconds, and button-pushing, so you can catch us in clear errors and keep out the part of life where our tendencies correct yours.” So much for an open-minded quest for insight.

The report appears to have little to say about the conservative mindset but instead, ironically, provides a critique of that of liberals.