Quote:
Originally Posted by Moontanman
Is it possible the reason every one seems to fall into these two categories is there were only two categories offered? Personally I don't ascribe to either ideology,
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The are some odd things about questor's study that I link in
post 14:
http://www.psych.nyu.edu/amodiolab/A...re%20Neuro.pdf
Looking at the graph, it has 7 people who identify themselves as conservative and none of them say they're strongly conservative. It has 29 liberal participants and four with no preference. Why so many more liberals in the stuy? More importantly - why so few participants at all? This type of study is prone to error. What if someone is not as conservative / liberal as they say they are? What if they used to be liberal, but as society has changed they now consider themselves conservative?
In a study with so many subjective variables it's a must to have a large sample which this study doesn't have. It also doesn't give other data on the participants. What if the conservatives in the study have a higher mean age than the liberals? The results of the study are far more likely to represent age in my mind because it basically measures what happens in someone's brain when they push a button repeatedly and occasionally push the wrong button.
The results could be biased by which group of people play more video games or which have better visual acuity. There is no control on this study - no way to know if they really are testing something that has
anything to do with political ideology. The proper thing to do would be a blind test where they get a few hundred participants and run the test without asking them what their ideology is (or even what the test is testing). When the test is over they try to guess the participants' ideology and see if the test is correct. But they didn't do this.
They didn't set up controls or assure any kind of fair sample. No, I don't like that study at all. Way too many assumptions. If you read the introduction which questor really likes, you see way too many assumptions. It's like the author was trying to get some quick newspaper headlines. I mean - It's a 2 page study - with graphs!
~modest
