Apparently it's news that political partisans don't have open minds about their positions, and now science can explain why. Isn't this what everyone else in the world means when they say, "I've made up my mind"?
Researchers asked staunch party members from both sides to evaluate information that threatened their preferred candidate prior to the 2004 Presidential election. The subjects' brains were monitored while they pondered.The results were announced today.
"We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning," said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University. "What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts." ...
The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making.
"None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged," Westen said. "Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones."
I don't see the problem. Strong political partisans have likely been exposed to a ton of political information through their lives, so why is it outrageous to discover that they're confident enough in their positions that they don't find it profitable or efficient to be continually rethinking them? Everyone acts this way in some regard. Religious believers may have at one time considered other systems of beliefs and then rejected them -- should they be expected to be constantly reconsidering their decision? Scientists don't continually re-prove well-accepted principles.
Sometimes a fixed belief can turn out to be detrimental if it actually does turn out to be factually wrong. If global warming isn't caused by humans, and if evolution isn't how we got here, then when those things are demonstrated a lot of people will look foolish. Likewise, if I end up in Hell when I die and the greeter tells me that Islam was right all along I'll be very disappointed. But meanwhile, if I'm convinced that I've considered all the evidence and come to the best possible conclusion, why should I live a life of constant doubt and waste mental energy going over old ground?
I guess it depends on whether or not you think truth matters. If it does, reasonable people should constantly question what they "know," particularly if they know that other equally rational, well-educated people "know" the opposite. Religion and politics are the worst examples of this, as very few people chose their religion or politics on a remotely objective basis in the first place. On both levels, most simply believe some combination of what their parents taught, and what their peers believe.
When what someone perceives as the truth turns out to be false, then their opinions and judgements that are based on that truth have to change as well. And we all know that some truths we clung to in the past turned out to be wrong (Earth as center of Solar System, Earth is flat, No way a machine could fly, no way we could reach the moon, etc. etc.) But for progress to occur we have to have not only people willing to keep examining the truths, turning over those rocks and exposing the mistakes that we make, it's also up to us to be willing to at least examine the possibilities something we believe in might be wrong. There's no harm in that.
And while I can see religious people keeping their faith clutched close to them, in the face of some scientific evidence, politics is not religion and to cling to a political truth in the face of new factual data is foolish. It's idolatry, and for religious people to do so is a sin against their God.
I think it's fun to keep reminding myself of why I believe what I believe, to try to explain and re-derive what I "know" in simpler and more elegant and more general ways. This is true of my views of politics (I'm always being exposed to new issues and having to figure out where I stand on them - I'm happy to report I'm not consistently on the "same" side), religion (or, rather, why religious people are religious and why secular people are secular), and even some of the more complicated science and math I know. Maybe I just have too much free time.