I accidentally ran across a followup article to the one I mentioned recently on people who don't think once they've chosen a political candidate. This article went a bit more in depth, and discussed more issues that were noticed from the study.

First off, we already discussed this:

"Emory University psychologist Drew Westen put self-identified Democratic and Republican partisans in brain scanners and asked them to evaluate negative information about various candidates. Both groups were quick to spot inconsistency and hypocrisy -- but only in candidates they opposed."

"When presented with negative information about the candidates they liked, partisans of all stripes found ways to discount it, Westen said. When the unpalatable information was rejected, furthermore, the brain scans showed that volunteers gave themselves feel-good pats -- the scans showed that "reward centers" in volunteers' brains were activated. The psychologist observed that the way these subjects dealt with unwelcome information had curious parallels with drug addiction as addicts also reward themselves for wrong-headed behavior."

They also ran into other info, regarding racial bias:

"That study found that supporters of President Bush and other conservatives had stronger self-admitted and implicit biases against blacks than liberals did."

Of course, it's not just conservatives:

"The analysis found that substantial majorities of Americans, liberals and conservatives, found it more difficult to associate black faces with positive concepts than white faces -- evidence of implicit bias."

But, as a whole, seems to be worse in conservatives:

"But districts that registered higher levels of bias systematically produced more votes for Bush."