Conservatives Big on Fear, Brain Study Finds

Um... Isn't LACK of fear more the product of lack of accountability? If you're less accountable, you have less to fear, I would think.

Nice selective reasoning you have there. "This is from a source I don't like therefore it's invalid." Ignorant reasoning like that is the reason our country is so divided and sides polarized. And if it was from a conservative source would you trust it then? I don't entirely everything in the article either but it makes some valid points in regards to not letting perceived mindsets dictate our politics. Also you ascribe name calling as liberal mindset tactic when conservatives engage in the same kind of tactics. Projection at it's finest

Likewise AK, you are accusing anonymous of doing the same thing you are doing. Can you say HYPOCRISY? Typical conservatist.

>>>a serious threat to his social standing, which in the evolutionary past had a serious link to his chances for survivial.

Intelligence does... having the intellectual capacity to look at a situation's possible outcomes and making an informed decision about whether that outcome is worth pursuing or not is what keeps people alive. One doesn't need to be afraid of snakes to know not to play with it. Moreover (in this specific example), certain religious sects frequently handle snakes without fear, but still end up dying from snake bites.

A lot of people were afraid to reduce nuclear weapons or ban lead in consumer goods.

liberals have lower IQ? where is that study?

This entire comment is a complete fabrication. Sorry you were so threatened by the scientific evidence in the article.

No, that should read "fare all that well on IQ tests either." But according to your logic you may just be claiming to be a liberal, yourself.

You realize that actually the exact opposite has been shown multiple times.
People that identify as classical liberals (libertarians) and strong liberal have an average I.Q. of 106.42, whereas those that identify as conservative and strong conservative have an average I.Q. of 94.82. Meaning that actually liberals have a higher I.Q. on average than those that claim to be conservative. According to a longitudinal study completed in 2010. (In case you're wondering, those who have strong liberal and classical liberal views actually scored similarly across the board, with no statistical difference)

A 2009 study correlated cognitive capacity with political beliefs among 1,254 community college students and 1,600 foreign students seeking entry to U.S. universities, it found that conservatism is "related to low performance on cognitive ability tests." In 2012, a paper reported that people endorse more conservative views when drunk or under cognitive pressure; it concluded that "political conservatism may be a process consequence of low-effort thought."

There is some evidence that liberals have less education, because people who have no high school education are more likely to be liberal (by a small margin), than conservative. This pattern repeats with those that didn't graduate high school, those that did graduate, those that have some college, and into college graduates, but once you get into post graduate work suddenly the trend is flipped on its head, drastically. People who have postgraduate education are almost entirely liberal.

Right on!

I'll take a stab at it..

I can address the specific argument you've posed by giving you a similar argument you can see through.
If you're very drunk and driving through the mountains at 120mph, I can tell you with a very high level of certainty that you'll crash. I can't tell you Exactly where you will crash, just like a meteorologist has trouble telling you what the weather will be in 11 days at a specific point on the planet.
The fact that you can't stay in your lane on a curvy road that you're traversing at well past what could possibly be a safe speed shows a clear pattern though.. you skid around the corners but eventually, you'll skid just a bit too far and you'll be embedded in the mountain or flying off the edge of the road.

Weather is chaotic. No one denies this. Just like no one knows exactly where the drunk will end up the next time they turn the wheel, it's difficult to predict Exactly what will happen in the next instant in a chaotic system.

It's not call Global Weather Change though.. is it?
It's called Global CLIMATE change.
Weather is not Climate. It's vitally important that you understand this so I'll harp on this a bit. Bear with me please.

Last Winter, it was brutally cold over most of North America. Conservatives predictably proclaimed Global Warming debunked because it was 15 below in the mid-west. But what about the other side of the planet? At the same time it was 15 below in North America, it was 60 degrees F at the same Latitude in Russia.
From the limited perspective of looking out a mid-west window, it sure looked like the climate was getting colder last winter but all you had to do to understand how faulty the perspective was to turn on the TV and watch people walking around in Shorts at the Winter Olympics.

We have a solid record of GLOBAL temperatures. We know that the planet has begun to warm precipitously since the start of the Industrial Revolution. It doesn't go up every year, sometimes the average temperature of the planet recedes for a year or two but the overall progress over decades.. over a century and a half.. has been upward.

Here's what we know...

* The average global temperature Has been going up since we started releasing large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere in the mid-1800s.
* several of the hottest average years on record have been in the past decade.
* Urban heat islands.. we've understood the phenomenon for almost a century.. we adjust for that in the data.
* C02.. Physicists have understood why it's Greenhouse gas and how it works as such for nearly Two hundred years. Seriously. The science is that settled.
You can prove it for yourself with a couple bottles, thermometers, a heat lamp and some bi-carbonate antacid tabs if you really wanted to.. the science is really that simple.
* It's OUR CO2 in the upper atmosphere. We know there's more Co2 in the upper atmosphere, we know how it affects the climate, and we know we put it there because it's isotope ratios match that of the carbon that was formerly locked away in fossil fuels.
* It's not the sun.
.. I could go on and on.

There's literally hundreds of years of solid evidence for Climate change. More than you can imagine. The science behind it is solid.
Further, to hold your position you have to argue that tens of thousands of Climate Scientists who have spent their lives becoming experts in this field have all successfully conspired to carry on an elaborate hoax without anyone giving up the secret. Have you ever known 10 people to keep a secret? Tens of thousands of Climate Scientists have though? For Decades?
Seriously?

Of course, you can ignore all the science and just believe that God wouldn't allow such a thing.
Let me re-cast your argument for you though.
"Not only has God taken great care of us and the planet that we live on".. he'd never allow plagues to happen that wipe out half of the population of a content, nor would he allow huge swaths of Australia burn year after year as it suffers through heat-induced droughts. He'd never allow a lake as large Erie to become so polluted that it's tributaries would catch on fire. He'd never allow for nuclear melt-downs that de-populated hundreds of square miles in Russia.. because he takes great care of us and the planet. Right? World Wars? Cataclysms like volcanos? Nope.. they don't happen because God takes care of us and the planet.

Maybe there's a god, maybe there isn't. If there is a Christian god though.. you should re-read your scriptures to see what he's capable of allowing. Not only did he give us free-will, he's demanded genocide of his followers in the past. We've proven we have the ability to destroy our environment over and over. That's undeniable. He hasn't stopped us before, he's not stopping us now.

Because weather is not the same thing as climate, and if you don't understand the difference in that, how can you expect to know anything about global warming? That is basic.

When you apply a flame to a kettle of water can you not predict the condition of the water in 10 minutes without being able to predict each individual bubble rising from the bottom of the kettle? "You thinks that it is the left, "the intellectuals" that are the ones that are afraid." And you may have a point there when we liberals on the "left" (as you label us) run into those who disregard science and look at the world with fearful aggression. But I don't lump conservatives into that group since real conservatives have always brought meaningful ideas to conversations. In my opinion, in just in the past few decades the meaning of conservatism has changed to something irrational and concerning to reasonable caring people.

100 years from now, the stock market will be higher than it is today. But I can't tell you what it will be next month or even next week. There's your answer, Thoughtful.

Climate change is a constant. Global warming is a public media term ... not sure when it popped up. Might have something to do with the popping up of "Inconvenient Truth". It was changed to get back to the 'science' and away from the 'media' sensationalism.
How can they know ... they say they are such and such % sure at this time due to this correlation. The evidence comes as time passes. Exon has papers that say they knew what they were doing would cause global climate changes. Don't you read the news?
Note on God ... not a he.
As for its cooled before ... well you may not like that very much either... the reality of climate change is you better be prepared to adapt. And as for NOW... the polar caps are melting and the inland glaciers are melting [98% of them anyway] so you better prepare for higher oceans which at the same time seem to be acidifying and dying. If you keep your head in the sand ... you will end up under water. These are facts. Read some real science research. There are even films to watch.

As for guns ... you don't listen very well there either. Nobody is banning them. Just taking unnecessary ones out of the hands of incompetent people. Who needs a fully automatic assault rifle? When is the last time some citizen used one to stop a crime? Really its just a fetish. A weird fashion. And has almost no relativity to this article in a psychology magazine.

Take the science for what it is and don't feel bad that you have less grey matter and a bigger fear factor. Conservatives fear strangers, the economy, the government itself. How's that for some generalizations.