Me conservative, me stupid: or at least rigid and habit-bound, says 'the science'.

'Back off, man, we're scientists!" That's Bill Murray in Ghostbusters, but it might as well be David Amodio of NYU. I appeared with him on a San Francisco public-radio program, Forum. His basic argument was, "I'm a scientist, I deal with facts," while Mr. Goldberg is a pundit who peddles "fictions." This scientific principle is also known as "I'm right, you're wrong! Nyah! Nyah!"

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Amodio is the lead author of a study that received the sort of coverage you'd expect if scientists discovered that embryonic stem cells can cure breast cancer, reverse global warming, and prove that George W. Bush stole the 2000 election.

Okay, not quite, but coverage of the study--"Neurocognitive Correlates of Liberalism and Conservatism," published in the journal Nature Neuroscience--was a fine example of the media's passing off a tiny crumb of evidence as a rich banquet of proof, simply because it conformed to their prejudices. Amodio and his co-authors rounded up 43 college students and asked them to peck at a keyboard when a series of "M"s and "W"s appeared on a computer screen. Half the students were told to make a "Go" signal when they saw an "M" and a "No go" when they saw a "W." The other half were told to do the reverse. The exercise took a total of 15 minutes.

From this, the authors claim that self-described conservatives--there were a grand total of seven in the study group--are more likely to make errors because they are conservatives. Right-wingers are more stubborn and closed-minded, while liberals are more cognitively flexible and able to adapt. "Liberals are more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty," the authors write. Amodio told the Daily Telegraph that "liberals tended to be more sensitive and responsive to information that might conflict with their habitual way of thinking."

Well, that's all the media needed to hear. Around the country and the world, news outlets reported that conservatives are as poorly wired as a Bulgarian toaster circa 1970. Agence France-Presse announced that conservatives in the study "were less flexible, refusing to deviate from old habits 'despite signals that this ... should be changed.'" The Los Angeles Times reported that the study "suggests that liberals are more adaptable than conservatives" and "might be better judges of the facts." It had already run an earlier article on the study in which two outside experts were consulted, both of them sympathetic to Amodio's findings. One of these experts, Frank Sulloway of UC-Berkeley's Institute of Personality and Social Research, was a co-author of an infamous 2003 study that reviewed decades of social-science research and concluded that conservatives tend to be fear-driven dogmatists who are incapable of dealing with ambiguity. The press release for that study, which is all that most journalists read, asserted that Adolf Hitler, Ronald Reagan, Benito Mussolini, and--wait for it!--Rush Limbaugh were all conservatives because "they all preached a return to an idealized past." The Los Angeles Times cited Sulloway to argue that Amodio's study could explain why President Bush has been so "single-minded" in his effort to win in Iraq, and why John Kerry was "perceived" by "some people" to be a "flip-flopper" for changing his mind about the war.

If only they'd let the kids peck at letters on a keyboard for a full half-hour, they might have discovered why Edmund Burke supported the American Revolution but not the French one.

Now, some will say I'm proving the scientists right by so reflexively disputing their new idea. But that's the problem--it's not new. Ninety years ago, John Dewey--the philosophical founder of modern liberalism--decried the "stupidity of habit-bound minds." He aimed the phrase at critics of the effort to outlaw war, but it perfectly captured his own attitude--and the attitude of liberalism generally, then and now. As a debater's weapon, it is perhaps the greatest and most sinister barb ever forged. It makes skepticism of "new" ideas into a liability, even a mental defect, immediately putting those with millennia of evidence and trial-and-error behind them--i.e., conservatives--on the defensive. Small-"c" conservatives aren't wrong because their arguments are wrong; they're wrong because the conservative approach--measure (at least) twice, cut once--is the product of a malformed mind.

Meanwhile, when conservatives favor change--free-market reforms, the overthrow of hostile governments, entrepreneurialism, whatever--it's not because we are comfortable with new information, but because our brains crave a more comfortable order.

The New Deal intellectual Stuart Chase captured this spirit nicely when he proclaimed, "I speak in dispraise of dusty learning, and in disparagement of the historical technique." He continued, "Are our plans wrong? Who knows? Can we tell from reading history? Hardly."

A parallel argument can be found in Marxism. Recall how, according to "scientific socialism," the rulers of society are slaves to their classes, acting out of necessity. Class consciousness, according to Marxists of various stripes, is imprinted on the brain, which is why so many industrialists, "kulaks," bourgeois intellectuals, and the like had to be liquidated or "reeducated." Later, the Soviets saw psychiatry as a political tool, throwing those unwilling to see the "objective truth" of socialism into nuthouses. (One might well note that the Communists most committed to such policies were fear-driven dogmatists who were uncomfortable with ambiguity and no doubt unable to give a "Go" sign when they saw a "W" pop up on a screen.)

Back in the United States, the Left found its own uses for psychiatry, particularly after World War II, when the Holocaust finally ended the progressive fondness for eugenics. In 1950, Theodor Adorno, a Frankfurt School Marxist, released The Authoritarian Personality, which is today among the most discredited major works of social science of the 20th century. At the time of its release, though, it was taken as the final word on the interplay of politics and the brain. According to Adorno, conservatives were closet fascists because, among other reasons, they had been subjected to "strict toilet training." (Having recently labored in this field with a young child, I wonder if inculcating fascist sympathies might be a small price for success.) Adorno's methods were designed to guarantee the results he wanted. From the outset, he worked on the assumption that sympathy for Communism was a sign of open-mindedness and hostility to totalitarianism. Therefore, Communists could never be creeping authoritarians, while anti-Communists almost by definition had to be.

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The Authoritarian Personality gave oxygen to a host of similar "findings." Adorno's colleague Max Horkheimer traced society's evils back to the "authoritarian family." Lionel Trilling famously asserted that conservatives deal not in ideas but in "irritable mental gestures." Richard Hofstadter swallowed The Authoritarian Personality whole, putting all of American history on the Freudian couch. The political scientist Herbert McClosky claimed he had scientifically proven not only that conservative "personality types" were drawn from the ranks of "the uninformed, the poorly educated, and ... the less intelligent," but also that they were "inflexible and unyielding" and "intolerant." To boot, the conservative "fears change, dreads disorder, and is intolerant of nonconformity," and "derogates reason." In 1964, over a thousand mental-health professionals declared that Barry Goldwater was not "psychologically fit" to be president of the United States. Why? Because he was a conservative. The organizer of the petition took out an ad in the New York Times announcing this very scientific finding. Gold-water sued--and won.

Now, it seems indisputable that there are biological, neurological, and even genetic factors in political orientation. But this is a vast--and vastly complicated--subject, with nature and nurture knotted together. Indeed, what these studies leave out is that while small-"c" conservatism may have a strong "wiring" component, opposition to change can be found across the ideological spectrum. There are Marxists who haven't accounted for an inconvenient fact in decades. Liberal Democrats see Social Security as sacrosanct, immutable, and timeless; and Al Gore's biggest campaign promise in 2000 was to create a "lock box" and "stand up and fight" against conservative change. Then there are conservatives who'd like to privatize and deregulate pretty much everything. Indeed, if businessmen are so often politically conservative, how come they're so comfortable with the ever-changing landscape of the market?

Hannah Arendt once observed that the greatest contribution the Left made to American politics in the 1930s was to dispute facts by attacking motives. But attacking motives was never good enough, because even motives can be rational, decent, and freely chosen. Better to proclaim that conservatives don't think at all, and ridicule the stupidity of their habit-bound minds. If conservatives complain--out of habit, no doubt--liberals can just say, "Back off, man, we're scientists." That this project continues today is a sign of the dogmatic and fear-driven illiberalism at liberalism's heart.