Neural correlates of maintaining one’s political beliefs in the face of counterevidence

http://www.nature.com/articles/srep39589

Political neuroscience and Stiller is like a match made in hell. This seems to have some of the same problems as the religion paper. Maybe some neuroscience people can help out, but the whole thing really sounds like a case of reverse inference. Regardless of that, there are other dubious aspects of methodology.

First, like in the religion paper where religion actually means Christianity, here political actually means opinionated liberal:

Specifically, participants answered a screening questionnaire in which they were asked about their political identification. On the question “Do you consider yourself a political person?” answers ranged on a scale from 1 (not at all) to 5 (very much). Participants were only included if they answered at least a 4 on this question. For the question “Which of the following describes your political self-identification?” answers ranged from 1 (strongly liberal) to 7 (strongly conservative) and participants were only included if they answered 1 or 2. Additionally, participants rated their agreement with several political and non-political statements and were only included in the experiment if they strongly agreed with at least 8 political and 8 non-political statements. Of 116 people who responded to our advertisements, 98 met the requirements for age, handedness, and political orientation. From those 98 people, 40 subjects met the requirements for strongly agreeing to at least 8 statements in each category.

I don't understand the reasoning behind this:

Each political and non-political statement was associated with 5 challenges. In order to be as compelling as possible, the challenges often contained exaggerations or distortions of the truth.

For example:

For instance, one challenge to the statement “The US should reduce its military budget” was “Russia has nearly twice as many active nuclear weapons as the United States”. In truth, according to statistics published by the Federation of American Scientists: Status of World Nuclear Forces (www.fas.org) in 2013, Russia has approximately 1,740 active nuclear warheads, while the United States has approximately 2,150.

Why would I change my mind on this if I know beforehand that the factoid is bullshit? "Counterevidence" should actually be counterevidence. This seriously muddies the waters.

And let's just drop data with no justification!

Only statements for which participants chose 6 or 7 (where 1 was strongly disagree and 7 was strongly agree) were used during their scan. If a given subject strongly believed more than 8 statements in a category, the statements were chosen for that subject as follows: first, preference was given to more strongly held beliefs (7 vs. 6). Second, all else being equal, preference was given for statements that were not as commonly believed, in order to balance the frequency of statements in the experiment.

Then take a look at the supplementary materials:

http://www.nature.com/article-assets/npg/srep/2016/161223/srep39589/extref/srep39589-s1.pdf

Some of the questions are not really apples and apples comparisons. Say, for example, that I believe in absolute rights to gun ownership. You can feed me a zillion factoids about how guns are evil, but my belief rating doesn't change. That's not necessarily a matter of just being stubbornly close-minded, it's just deontological reasoning. (But this is Stiller, so deontology don't real.) Some of them are not really neatly in the political vs. non-political realm, e.g. "Overpopulation is a serious global concern."