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Originally Posted by Riot
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The article is typical propaganda in that the whole article is pretty much half-truths. Half-truths are not outright lies. They have some truth to them but they are very misleading because they take a lot of things out of context and they only give you half the story.
The most interesting part of the article was at the beginning: “There were images that caused fear and disgust -- a spider crawling on a person's face, maggots in an open wound -- but also images that made you feel happy: a smiling child, a bunny rabbit.” The researchers noted two differences between the groups. The researchers studied their subjects' reactions by tracking their eye movements and monitoring their “skin conductivity” – a measure of one's autonomic nervous system's reaction to stimuli.
Conservatives showed much stronger skin responses to negative images, compared with the positive ones. Liberals showed the opposite. And when the scientists turned to studying eye gaze or "attentional" patterns, they found that conservatives looked much more quickly at negative or threatening images, and [then] spent more time fixating on them."
It was very interesting to me in that I came to a totally different conclusion than the author. My conclusion is that the conservatives behaved like normal people. Who wouldn't have a huge negative reaction when they see something horrific? I guess the answer is liberals. Liberals live in denial. If they see something horrific, they just shrug it off like it never even happened. That's actually not a very good evolutionary trait or survival trait. I think natural selection would reward the people that vividly remember something that is horrific and/or threatening and are vigilant in avoiding such threats in the future.
In addition, a person who has a real heart and is compassionate is going to be very upset when they see something that is disturbing. I am like that. I am certainly not ashamed of that. At least I'm not like a liberal who could look at something horrific and then just shrug it off and have very little or no reaction to it. It is bizarre that the author thinks this is a good trait (to have little or no reaction to something horrific).