According to this article, liberal brains and conservative brains are neurologically different from each other.

Each participant was wired to an electroencephalograph that recorded activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that detects conflicts between a habitual tendency (pressing a key) and a more appropriate response (not pressing the key). Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W, researchers said. Liberals and conservatives were equally accurate in recognizing M.

It seems that conservatives are more easily conditioned as well, which would explain why religions and cults love to reiterate symbolic acts and messages. Once you have won over a conservative's mind there is no turning him back, he has been conditioned and that conditioning is difficult to work off.

Each participant was wired to an electroencephalograph that recorded activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that detects conflicts between a habitual tendency (pressing a key) and a more appropriate response (not pressing the key). Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W, researchers said. Liberals and conservatives were equally accurate in recognizing M.

One worrying side-effect of such research is that it gives politicians and businesses better tools to manipulate people. For instance, if I were a business man, I would know that continuously broadcasting a simple message to a conservative is more effective in terms of advertisement dollars spent than advertising to a liberal who will actually use his brain, rather than the conditioned message, in order to make a decision.

Sulloway said the results could explain why President Bush demonstrated a single-minded commitment to the Iraq war and why some people perceived Sen. John F. Kerry, the liberal Massachusetts Democrat who opposed Bush in the 2004 presidential race, as a "flip-flopper" for changing his mind about the conflict.

Also this shows that the message should not change, it should be a simple, single-minded message that is reiterated over and over again to zombie drones ready to make the conditioning based decision.

Sulloway said liberals were 4.9 times as likely as conservatives to show activity in the brain circuits that deal with conflicts, and 2.2 times as likely to score in the top half of the distribution for accuracy.

If the message changes due to new or conflicting information, the conservative mind is not able to deal with it. Due to this, the conservative mind isn't as accurate in the way it performs its tasks. It just gets stuck and keeps repeating the mistakes like re-electing bad leaders over and over again.

The author however cautions:

(The lead author)...cautioned that the study looked at a narrow range of human behavior and that it would be a mistake to conclude that one political orientation was better. The tendency of conservatives to block distracting information could be a good thing depending on the situation, he said.

The original story was further commented on at the Pensito Review