Re: The Surprising Brain Differences Between Democrats and Republicans

On 14 Feb 2022, Rudy Canoza <[email protected]> posted some
news:[email protected]: 

> This is why I wear dresses and lipstick.

It is still considered highly uncool to ascribe a person’s political 
beliefs, even in part, to that person’s biology: hormones, physiological 
responses, even brain structures and genes. And no wonder: Doing so raises 
all kinds of thorny, non-PC issues involving free will, determinism, 
toleration, and much else.

There’s just one problem: Published scientific research keeps going there, 
with ever increasing audacity (not to mention growing stacks of data).

The past two weeks have seen not one but two studies published in 
scientific journals on the biological underpinnings of political ideology. 
And these studies go straight at the role of genes and the brain in 
shaping our views, and even our votes.

First, in the American Journal of Political Science, a team of researchers 
including Peter Hatemi of Penn State University and Rose McDermott of 
Brown University studied the relationship between our deep-seated 
tendencies to experience fear—tendencies that vary from person to person, 
partly for reasons that seem rooted in our genes—and our political 
beliefs. What they found is that people who have more fearful disposition 
also tend to be more politically conservative, and less tolerant of 
immigrants and people of races different from their own. As McDermott 
carefully emphasizes, that does not mean that every conservative has a 
high fear disposition. “It’s not that conservative people are more 
fearful, it’s that fearful people are more conservative,” as she puts it.

I interviewed the paper’s lead author, Peter Hatemi, about his research 
for my 2012 book The Republican Brain. Hatemi is both a political 
scientist and also a microbiologist, and as he stressed to me, “nothing is 
all genes, or all environment.” These forces combine to make us who we 
are, in incredibly intricate ways.

And if Hatemi’s and McDermott’s research blows your mind, get this: Darren 
Schreiber, a political neuroscientist at the University of Exeter in the 
United Kingdom, first performed brain scans on 82 people participating in 
a risky gambling task, one in which holding out for more money increases 
your possible rewards, but also your possible losses. Later, cross-
referencing the findings with the participants’ publicly available 
political party registration information, Schreiber noticed something 
astonishing: Republicans, when they took the same gambling risk, were 
activating a different part of the brain than Democrats.

Republicans were using the right amygdala, the center of the brain’s 
threat response system. Democrats, in contrast, were using the insula, 
involved in internal monitoring of one’s feelings. Amazingly, Schreiber 
and his colleagues write that this test predicted 82.9 percent of the 
study subjects’ political party choices—considerably better, they note, 
than a simple model that predicts your political party affiliation based 
on the affiliation of your parents.

I also interviewed Schreiber for The Republican Brain. He’s a scientist 
who was once quite cautious about the relevance of brain studies to 
people’s politics. As he put it to me: “If you had called me four years 
ago and said, ‘What is your view on whether Republicans and Democrats have 
different brains?’ I would have said no.” Now, his own published research 
suggests otherwise.

One again, though, there’s a critical nuance here. Schreiber thinks the 
current research suggests not only that having a particular brain 
influences your political views, but also that having a particular 
political view influences and changes your brain. The causal arrow seems 
likely to run in both directions—which would make sense in light of what 
we know about the plasticity of the brain. Simply by living our lives, we 
change our brains. Our political affiliations, and the lifestyles that go 
along with them, probably condition many such changes.

The two new studies described here are likely connected: It is hard not to 
infer that fear of outsiders or those different from you—along with 
greater fear dispositions in general—may be related to the role of 
amygdala, a brain structure that has been dubbed the “heart and soul of 
the fear system.” The amygdala has been repeatedly implicated in politics. 
Indeed, Schreiber’s research builds on prior brain studies: In a group of 
University College of London students, for instance, conservatives showed 
more gray matter in the right amygdala.

So what’s the upshot? How about this: We need a much broader and more 
thoughtful discussion about what it means if political ideology turns out 
to be nothing like what we actually thought it was. Scientists working in 
this new field tend towards the conclusion that the new research should 
make us more tolerant, not less, of political difference—not to mention a 
whole lot more humble about our own deeply held beliefs.

<https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/02/brain-difference-democrats-
republicans/>