Re: Conservative and Liberal Brains Might Have Some Real Differences

On 08 Nov 2021, Tritek <[email protected]> posted some
news:[email protected]: 

> Democrats are such mentally challenged retards.

In 1968 a debate was held between conservative thinker William F. Buckley, 
Jr., and liberal writer Gore Vidal. It was hoped that these two members of 
opposing intellectual elites would show Americans living through 
tumultuous times that political disagreements could be civilized. That 
idea did not last for long. Instead Buckley and Vidal descended rapidly 
into name-calling. Afterward, they sued each other for defamation.

The story of the 1968 debate opens a well-regarded 2013 book called 
Predisposed, which introduced the general public to the field of political 
neuroscience. The authors, a trio of political scientists at the 
University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Rice University, argued that if the 
differences between liberals and conservatives seem profound and even 
unbridgeable, it is because they are rooted in personality characteristics 
and biological predispositions.

On the whole, the research shows, conservatives desire security, 
predictability and authority more than liberals do, and liberals are more 
comfortable with novelty, nuance and complexity. If you had put Buckley 
and Vidal in a magnetic resonance imaging machine and presented them with 
identical images, you would likely have seen differences in their brain, 
especially in the areas that process social and emotional information. The 
volume of gray matter, or neural cell bodies, making up the anterior 
cingulate cortex, an area that helps detect errors and resolve conflicts, 
tends to be larger in liberals. And the amygdala, which is important for 
regulating emotions and evaluating threats, is larger in conservatives.

While these findings are remarkably consistent, they are probabilities, 
not certainties—meaning there is plenty of individual variability. The 
political landscape includes lefties who own guns, right-wingers who drive 
Priuses and everything in between. There is also an unresolved chicken-
and-egg problem: Do brains start out processing the world differently or 
do they become increasingly different as our politics evolve? Furthermore, 
it is still not entirely clear how useful it is to know that a 
Republican’s brain lights up over X while a Democrat’s responds to Y.

So what can the study of neural activity suggest about political behavior? 
The still emerging field of political neuroscience has begun to move 
beyond describing basic structural and functional brain differences 
between people of different ideological persuasions—gauging who has the 
biggest amygdala—to more nuanced investigations of how certain cognitive 
processes underlie our political thinking and decision-making. 
Partisanship does not just affect our vote; it influences our memory, 
reasoning and even our perception of truth. Knowing this will not 
magically bring us all together, but researchers hope that continuing to 
understand the way partisanship influences our brain might at least allow 
us to counter its worst effects: the divisiveness that can tear apart the 
shared values required to retain a sense of national unity.

Social scientists who observe behaviors in the political sphere can gain 
substantial insight into the hazards of errant partisanship. Political 
neuroscience, however, attempts to deepen these observations by supplying 
evidence that a belief or bias manifests as a measure of brain volume or 
activity—demonstrating that an attitude, conviction or misconception is, 
in fact, genuine. “Brain structure and function provide more objective 
measures than many types of survey responses,” says political 
neuroscientist Hannah Nam of Stony Brook University. “Participants may be 
induced to be more honest when they think that scientists have a ‘window’ 
into their brains.” That is not to say that political neuroscience can be 
used as a tool to “read minds,” but it can pick up discrepancies between 
stated positions and underlying cognitive processes.

Brain scans are also unlikely to be used as a biomarker for specific 
political results because the relationships between the brain and politics 
is not one-to-one. Yet “neurobiological features could be used as a 
predictor of political outcomes—just not in a deterministic way,” Nam 
says.

To study how we process political information in a 2017 paper, political 
psychologist Ingrid Haas of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and her 
colleagues created hypothetical candidates from both major parties and 
assigned each candidate a set of policy statements on issues such as 
school prayer, Medicare and defense spending. Most statements were what 
you would expect: Republicans, for instance, usually favor increasing 
defense spending, and Democrats generally support expanding Medicare. But 
some statements were surprising, such as a conservative expressing a pro-
choice position or a liberal arguing for invading Iran.

Haas put 58 people with diverse political views in a brain scanner. On 
each trial, participants were asked whether it was good or bad that a 
candidate held a position on a particular issue and not whether they 
personally agreed or disagreed with it. Framing the task that way allowed 
the researchers to look at neural processing as a function of whether the 
information was expected or unexpected—what they termed congruent or 
incongruent. They also considered participants’ own party identification 
and whether there was a relationship between ideological differences and 
how the subjects did the task.

Liberals proved more attentive to incongruent information, especially for 
Democratic candidates. When they encountered such a position, it took them 
longer to make a decision about whether it was good or bad. They were 
likely to show activation for incongruent information in two brain 
regions: the insula and anterior cingulate cortex, which “are involved in 
helping people form and think about their attitudes,” Haas says. How do 
out-of-the-ordinary positions affect later voting? Haas suspects that 
engaging more with such information might make voters more likely to 
punish candidates for it later. But she acknowledges that they may instead 
exercise a particular form of bias called “motivated reasoning” to 
downplay the incongruity.

Motivated reasoning, in which people work hard to justify their opinions 
or decisions, even in the face of conflicting evidence, has been a popular 
topic in political neuroscience because there is a lot of it going around. 
While partisanship plays a role, motivated reasoning goes deeper than 
that. Just as most of us like to think we are good-hearted human beings, 
people generally prefer to believe that the society they live in is 
desirable, fair and legitimate. “Even if society isn’t perfect, and there 
are things to be criticized about it, there is a preference to think that 
you live in a good society,” Nam says. When that preference is 
particularly strong, she adds, “that can lead to things like simply 
rationalizing or accepting long-standing inequalities or injustices.” 
Psychologists call the cognitive process that lets us do so “system 
justification.”

Nam and her colleagues set out to understand which brain areas govern the 
affective processes that underlie system justification. They found that 
the volume of gray matter in the amygdala is linked to the tendency to 
perceive the social system as legitimate and desirable. Their 
interpretation is that “this preference to system justify is related to 
these basic neurobiological predispositions to be alert to potential 
threats in your environment,” Nam says.

After the original study, Nam’s team followed a subset of the participants 
for three years and found that their brain structure predicted the 
likelihood of whether they participated in political protests during that 
time. “Larger amygdala volume is associated with a lower likelihood of 
participating in political protests,” Nam says.  “That makes sense in so 
far as political protest is a behavior that says, ‘We’ve got to change the 
system.’”

Understanding the influence of partisanship on identity, even down to the 
level of neurons, “helps to explain why people place party loyalty over 
policy, and even over truth,” argued psychologists Jay Van Bavel and 
Andrea Pereira, both then at New York University, in Trends in Cognitive 
Sciences in 2018. In short, we derive our identities from both our 
individual characteristics, such as being a parent, and our group 
memberships, such as being a New Yorker or an American. These affiliations 
serve multiple social goals: they feed our need to belong and desire for 
closure and predictability, and they endorse our moral values. And our 
brain represents them much as it does other forms of social identity.

Among other things, partisan identity clouds memory. In a 2013 study, 
liberals were more likely to misremember George W. Bush remaining on 
vacation in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and conservatives were 
more likely to falsely recall seeing Barack Obama shaking hands with the 
president of Iran. Partisan identity also shapes our perceptions. When 
they were shown a video of a political protest in a 2012 study, liberals 
and conservatives were more or less likely to favor calling police 
depending on their interpretation of the protest’s goal. If the objective 
was liberal (opposing the military barring openly gay people from 
service), the conservatives were more likely to want the cops. The 
opposite was true when participants thought it was a conservative protest 
(opposing an abortion clinic). The more strongly we identify with a party, 
the more likely we are to double down on our support for it. That tendency 
is exacerbated by rampant political misinformation and, too often, 
identity wins out over accuracy.

If we understand what is at work cognitively, we might be able to 
intervene and try to ease some of the negative effects of partisanship. 
The tension between accuracy and identity probably involves a brain region 
called the orbitofrontal cortex, which computes the value of goals and 
beliefs and is strongly connected to memory, executive function and 
attention. If identity helps determine the value of different beliefs, it 
can also distort them, Van Bavel says. Appreciating that political 
affiliation fulfills an evolutionary need to belong suggests we should 
create alternative means of belonging—depoliticizing the novel coronavirus 
by calling on us to come together as Americans, for instance. And 
incentivizing the need to be accurate could increase the importance 
accorded that goal: paying money for accurate responses or holding people 
accountable for incorrect ones have been shown to be effective.

It will be nearly impossible to lessen the partisan influences before the 
November 3 election because the volume of political information will only 
increase, reminding us of our political identities daily. But here is some 
good news: a large 2020 study at Harvard University found that 
participants consistently overestimated the level of out-group negativity 
toward their in-group. In other words, the other side may not dislike us 
quite so much as we think. Inaccurate information heightened the negative 
bias, and (more good news) correcting inaccurate information significantly 
reduced it.

“The biology and neuroscience of politics might be useful in terms of what 
is effective at getting through to people,” Van Bavel says. “Maybe the way 
to interact with someone who disagrees with me politically is not to try 
to persuade them on the deep issue, because I might never get there. It’s 
more to try to understand where they’re coming from and shatter their 
stereotypes.”

<https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/conservative-and-liberal-
brains-might-have-some-real-differences/>