From The New Scientist via the amazing Mary Ellen Bates (Librarian Extraordinare) comes a new study from Assistant Professor David Amodio at New York University, which confirms my suspicions that my liberal politics are simply the result of my problem solving abilities. According to the study, a self-identified Liberal brain is able to adapt quickly to sudden change when compared to a self-identified politically Conservative brain:

"The participants then had to sit before a computer screen and press one of two buttons depending on whether they saw an "M" or a "W". They had half a second to make each response, so there was a great deal of pressure to react quickly.

"Out of the 500 trials that each subject completed, he or she was presented with the same letter 80% of the time. This meant that the participants felt compelled to press the same button repeatedly.

...

"When the less common letter did appear on the screen, the people who identified themselves as more conservative (rating themselves somewhere between 1 and 5 on the initial questionnaire) pressed the "usual" button 47% of the time instead of switching to the correct button. "By comparison, the "liberals" who placed themselves between -5 and -1 on the questionnaire responded more readily to the new signal and achieved the slightly lower error rate of 37%."

snip

No surprise to me.