Science Asks: Who’s More Pig-Headed, Dems or Republicans?

TIME:

Forget the ancient Greeks’ advice.  In this political climate, it’s more like “nothing in moderation, everything in excess.”

Frank Bruni’s column in Monday’s New York Times highlights some of the cable-TV hyperbole that seems to plague our political discussions these days by asking whether all the Nazi metaphors and lynching references have in fact pulled the right and the left further apart, making compromise impossible.

“When nuance and perspective exit the language, do they exit the conversation as well?” he wrote.  ”When you speak in ludicrous extremes, do you think that way, too?

According to science, yes.

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Belief superiority is the idea that your views are more “right” or true than someone else’s.  ”I am good, and therefore everything I think is right,’” explains Dr. Kaitlin E. Toner, one of the study co-authors. “You want to think of yourself in a positive way, and you come up with thoughts and behaviors to rationalize that image.”

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