http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2015/11/15/1448283/-The-sad-pathology-of-the-GOP-frontrunners?detail=email
As we see the various “outsider” GOP frontrunners like Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and Carly Fiorina continue to dominate over the far more experienced field of actual legislators and governors, It’s hard not to notice a pattern of grandiose behavior that seems to be common among many conservatives. But it seems even more pronounced among those particular candidates.
Let’s consider, for a moment, just how well the behavior of Trump, Carson, and Fiorina resembles this description of narcissistic personality disorder from the Mayo Clinic:
If you have narcissistic personality disorder, you may come across as conceited, boastful or pretentious. You often monopolize conversations. You may belittle or look down on people you perceive as inferior. You may feel a sense of entitlement — and when you don't receive special treatment, you may become impatient or angry. You may insist on having "the best" of everything — for instance, the best car, athletic club or medical care.
At the same time, you have trouble handling anything that may be perceived as criticism. You may have secret feelings of insecurity, shame, vulnerability and humiliation. To feel better, you may react with rage or contempt and try to belittle the other person to make yourself appear superior. Or you may feel depressed and moody because you fall short of perfection [emphasis added]
Scientists have begun to find that there really is more than just difference of opinion between liberals and conservatives: There actually are physiological and psychological differences between them. That’s the conclusion of a study published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences:
A large body of political scientists and political psychologists now concur that liberals and conservatives disagree about politics in part because they are different people at the level of personality, psychology, and even traits like physiology and genetics.
That's a big deal. It challenges everything that we thought we knew about politics—upending the idea that we get our beliefs solely from our upbringing, from our friends and families, from our personal economic interests, and calling into question the notion that in politics, we can really change (most of us, anyway).
The occasion of this revelation is a paper by John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska and his colleagues, arguing that political conservatives have a "negativity bias," meaning that they are physiologically more attuned to negative (threatening, disgusting) stimuli in their environments. (The paper can be read for free here.) In the process,
Hibbing et al. marshal a large body of evidence, including their own experiments using eye trackers and other devices to measure the involuntary responses of political partisans to different types of images. One finding? That conservatives respond much more rapidly to threatening and aversive stimuli (for instance, images of "a very large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody face, and an open wound with maggots in it," as one of their papers put it).
In other words, the conservative ideology, and especially one of its major facets—centered on a strong military, tough law enforcement, resistance to immigration, widespread availability of guns—would seem well tailored for an underlying, threat-oriented biology.
This basic threat-based biology issue goes a long way toward explaining GOP hopefuls who bang on the warning bells of danger incessantly. There’s mass immigrant invasion a la Trump, Planned Parenthood’s “fetus on the table with its heart beating, legs kicking, about to have it’s brain harvested” a la Fiorina, and Carson’s continued litany of biographical gaffes while he argues the evils of dreaded liberals and the biased media.
Another factor which seems common to people like Carson, Fiorina, and Trump seems to be the complete inability to correct a mistakes or false impressions when challenged with more up-to-date information. That seems to closely resemble confirmation bias.
A confirmation bias is a type of cognitive bias that involves favoring information that confirms previously existing beliefs or biases. For example, imagine that a person holds a belief that left-handed people are more creative than right-handed people. Whenever this person encounters a person that is both left-handed and creative, they place greater importance on this "evidence" supporting their already existing belief. This individual might even seek out "proof" that further backs up this belief, while discounting examples that do not support this idea.
Confirmation biases impact how people gather information, but they also influence how people interpret and recall information.
For example, people who support or oppose a particular issue will not only seek information that supports their beliefs, they will also interpret news stories in a way that upholds their existing ideas and remember things in a way that also reinforces these attitudes.
i find this interesting and it does seem to mirror the personalities and action and reactions by the different sides. i am biased to liberal ideology and find republican ideals disturbingly egregious but i'm sure you all know that. +o). problem like the article points out they will not except or given a second thought to the findings but it will be in their heads God Bless the sub conscious. until they accept the reality they will be in constant turmoil not good for potential leaders to enter that room with baggage weighing them down and more cooks then recipes in the kitchen.
also keep in mind they deny science but just the science that doesn't promote their agenda for people who say they are not scientist or Popes they sure try to force a lot of their opinions on others while rejecting others adhering to one philosophy makes you half cocked with low information
