Kiss My Anterior Cingulate Cortex, Conservatives!

Well, that goes a long way toward explaining why our conservative brethren cling to the Bush administration's dogma in the face of what liberals see as unassailable logic. Our brains are just different.

Previous psychological studies have found that conservatives tend to be more structured and persistent in their judgments whereas liberals are more open to new experiences. The latest study found those traits are not confined to political situations but also influence everyday decisions.

And this explains the rest.

The conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information.

But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths.

This phenomenon may help explain why large numbers of Americans incorrectly think that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in planning the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and that most of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi. While these beliefs likely arose because Bush administration officials have repeatedly tried to connect Iraq with Sept. 11, the experiments suggest that intelligence reports and other efforts to debunk this account may in fact help keep it alive.

The poor sheeple apparently really can't help themselves after all. If only half of us are predisposed to being open minded, and all of us are hard-wired to reject reason in favor of woo after only a few repetitions, what hope hath the republic?