Political partisans don't use logic

A new study here at livescience.com shows that political partisans use emotion rather than logic when evaluating political statements.

From the article:

"The tests involved pairs of statements by the candidates, President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry, that clearly contradicted each other. The test subjects were asked to consider and rate the discrepancy. Then they were presented with another statement that might explain away the contradiction. The scenario was repeated several times for each candidate.

"The brain imaging revealed a consistent pattern. Both Republicans and Democrats consistently denied obvious contradictions for their own candidate but detected contradictions in the opposing candidate.

'The result is that partisan beliefs are calcified, and the person can learn very little from new data,' Westen said.

"Notably absent were any increases in activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most associated with reasoning."