I don't find this particularly counter-intuitive personally. But really, if this is the case, then it doesn't really matter how counter-intuitive it is. Reality is reality.

However, the brain is very complex and there are a myraid of factors that need to be taken into account so put me in the "Its interesting, but more research is needed" basket.

Probably depends on what you believe in.

For example in the "Liberals make more money and are more educated then conservative studes" studies...

Little known fact.... People who are Soicially Liberal and Fiscally Conservative... make even more money, and are even more educated.  Little known of course, since it's usually just used as a partisian "We're smarter so our ideas are right" arguement from Liberals... and they obviously wouldn't want to admit that based on that reasoning... half of what they believed in was actually wrong.

So Liberarians i'd imagine would have an even bigger ACC, while your Socially conservative, fiscally liberal people would probably have the largest amygdala's.

Like GW Bush and the rest of the Neocons.   Whose entire political strategy has basically always been on an outside threat.  Starting with the USSR.

Thinking about it too highwaystar... i'd say that some reasonings for things are more emotional based then others.

I mean, being against gay marriage i would thing requires more emotional attachment then  funding an art gallery.

You could have an emotional reasoning for wanting to keep the art gallery, but you could also think about the positive effects an art gallery has on the community and just on education.  While being against gay marriage... it's one of the few arguements I literally can't understand that point of view.

I mean, as another example.  I'm for raising the taxes in the state i'm currently in... why?   Because there is 0 income tax, 0 corporation tax, and still nobody wants to move their kids here.

If I had to guess it's because there is only 1 decent college in the state. (Soon to NOT be decent if budget cuts pass) and because the school systems have a graduation rate of like 47%.

Throwing more money at the problem won't helpt the school systems... but neither will cutting even more students.

That would make sense, because conservatism necessitates an emotional attachment to something that is or was, hence something to "conserve," whether that's nostalgic values of '50s Americana, a system of cowboy capitalism dating to the industrial revolution, various religious norms that were foundational to the country itself, or on the darker side, yearning at various times for a time when the country wasn't overrun by Hispanics, Asians, free-voting Blacks, Jews, Polish, Italians, or Irish

You have to be emotionally invested in the idea that "time x was good" or "y aspect of today is good, don't destroy it," which can have rational underpinnings, but is still primarily motivated by your liking for it as a thing good in itself

I still think a large portion of studies like this are representative of (probably unintentional) sampling bias ...

A large portion of people’s political orientation is determined by their values and beliefs they generated over decades of their life experiences and social interactions. Often, simply by moving from one region in a country to another and having a completely different series of life experiences will drastically impact a person’s political views; as can be witnessed in Canada, as hundreds of thousands of people have moved from liberal regions of the country to conservative Alberta and adopted the conservative views of the region after a couple of years. I find it impossible to believe that this political conversion is the result of a drastic change in brain structure.

Why this is important is that two people who share political ideals in two different regions may do so based on two drastically different life experiences and social interactions. Effectively, a conservative in a conservative region probably bases their political views on what they see as the successes of conservative ideology, while a conservative in a more progressive region may base their political views on what they see as the failure of progressive ideology; and you could (probably) say something similar about more progressive voters. Unless you do a broad study that controls for countless socioeconomic factors, it is likely that your results are being heavily skewed.

For the most part, classical conservatism is dead and what we call conservatism is classical liberalism; at the same time, most of what we call liberalism today is a combination of the progressive movement from the first half of the last century and social democratic values from Europe.

Liberal and conservative is all relative, hence why the classical definition is no longer valid (or has shifted to other names, hence classical liberalism becoming libertarianism or objectivism). Like in the Soviet Union, when the country was unravelling, it was the hardcore Communists who were the conservatives, and the free-market, pro-nationalist, pro-religion folks who were the liberals (closer again to classical liberalism, but still...), but the constant for that is that the conservative wants to preserve the "old" order or some aspect of it. It's when you take them out of context that their political classification changes, and then the ability to evaluate them psychologically becomes more of a chore (given that if you picked up an American Conservative Republican from the '50s and dropped him in the Soviet Union in the late '80s, his values would make him a Liberal of that time and place, but his psychological state would remain the same)

I don't even want to get started on this, you could interpret it so many ways, but it is kind of interesting.

Centralist FTW !!!!!!

Don't even need to go that far for an example.

A typical American Democrat "liberal" politician dropped into an EU country would be considered so conservative as to be unelectable. Like Obama's stance on, for example, healthcare, welfare, abortion or online gambling.