Every election season, commentators trot out the old statistics about how more education makes people more likely to support Democrats, more studies are published on how liberal Daily Show viewers are so well-informed, and various smart people try to explain why anyone would ever vote for a Republican, against their "self-interest." This month has seen three alarming and remarkable scientific investigations into Americans' inexplicable habit of voting for George Bush and John McCain. Which means: trend! Hooray! Let's take a look at what America's top scienticians say about fucking idiot flyover losers and their stupid voting: Conservatives Are Scared A Lot Rice University Political Scientist John Alford published some research in the creatively named journal Science about a possible biological basis to liberalism and conservatism. Basically, "46 mostly white Midwesterners who self-identified as having strong political beliefs" were shown "threatening images" ("a large spider on someone's face, a bloodied person and maggot-filled wound"). The conservatives were more scared, of all of the images. Or, as Newsweek puts it, "illegal immigrants may = spiders = gay marriages = maggot-filled wounds = abortion rights = bloodied faces. " Liberals were not sensitive to the scary images. Which means they're biologically inferior, because they'd die if a gay spider tried to abort their faces to death. Notable problems with this study: small sample, also wtf this doesn't explain anything. Conservatives Refuse to Believe "Facts" The most upsetting and alarming research? Probably Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler's backfire effect study. In that, the political scientists took two groups of volunteers and gave them the Bush administration's prewar claims that Iraq was a threat and had weapons of mass destruction.

One group was given a refutation — the comprehensive 2004 Duelfer report that concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded in 2003. Thirty-four percent of conservatives told only about the Bush administration's claims thought Iraq had hidden or destroyed its weapons before the U.S. invasion, but 64 percent of conservatives who heard both claim and refutation thought that Iraq really did have the weapons. The refutation, in other words, made the misinformation worse.