Neuropolitics

There is an interesting site here that appears to be run by two microbiologists named Brack and Zhang. They have the entirely commendable aim of finding what the biological influences on political orientation are. And some of their findings sound fun indeed. For instance:

“In our most recent survey, Liberals in general were 43% more likely to report general anxiety disorder than Conservatives. They were 115% more likely to report panic disorders, 119% more likely to report agoraphobic symptoms, 118% more likely to report OCD symptoms. and 54% more likely to report social anxiety disorder. When broken down further into Very Conservative, Conservative, Liberal and Very Liberal cohorts, the numbers spread further apart. The Very Conservatives have the lowest rates of anxiety disorders, the Very Liberals the highest.

Sadly, we cannot get too carried away by that finding. It runs contrary to decades of previous research on the subject—research of which Brack & Zhang seem to be unaware. In properly sampled surveys, the correlation between anxiety/neuroticism and politics has repeatedly been found to be negligible. See for instance here. And the “sampling” employed by Brack & Zhang is ludicrous. They base their conclusions on people who respond to internet surveys—a group which can in no way be claimed to be representative of the population at large.

Another problem with the Brack and Zhang reports is that they give the statistical significance of the differences they find as if it were a big deal. But statistical significance is only a means of allowing for small sample sizes and their “samples” are large in statistical terms. It may help if I point out that with a sample of 400 people (the sort of “sample” they use) a totally negligible correlation of .10 would be shown as statistically significant. They would be much more impressive from a scholarly point of view if the first report of their findings were in terms of standard descriptive statistics such as (say) the Pearson product-moment correlations between their variables.

Posted by jonjayray on Monday, April 10, 2006 at 09:13 PM in Psychology
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