InstaPundit is skeptical but disturbed about a new kind of political research that seems to show Democrats are scaredy cats. Writes John Tierney in The New York Times:
In this political experiment, unlike the usual ones, the subject did not respond by turning a dial or discussing his reactions with a focus group.
He lay inside an M.R.I. machine, watching commercials playing on the inside of his goggles as neuroscientists from the University of California, Los Angeles, measured the blood flow in his brain.
The researchers are finding a marked difference in Democrats' and Republicans' response to images of the burning twin towers (used in a GW ad) and an atomic bomb explosion (used in LBJ's famous "Daisy" ad). Democrats reacted with noticeably more activity in the amygdala -- the part of the brain that responds to threats and danger -- than did the Republicans.
[Former Clinton strategist Tom] Freedman suggested [an] interpretation based on his political experience: the theory that Democrats are generally more alarmed by any use of force than Republicans are.
Mr. Freedman and William Knapp, a strategist with both Clinton presidential campaigns and the Gore campaign in 2000, turned to this technology after consulting with Mr. Freedman's brother, Dr. Joshua Freedman, an assistant professor of psychiatry at U.C.L.A., who was less than impressed by the methodology of political consultants.
"It seemed so last century," Professor Freedman said. "Consultants were quoting Freud as if it was cutting edge. It was all about interpretation instead of using new technology to measure what's actually happening in the mind."
We're a little skeptical ourselves, come to think of it. Those antiglobalist leftist loonies, for example, don't seem to shy away from the use of force, as long as it's they, and not the police, who are using it. Not to mention the unmentionable Al Franken, who physically assaulted a protester at a Dean event in New Hampshire during the Democratic primaries, later explaining he was merely trying to protect the right of people to speak freely by exercising his constitutional right to assault.
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