Neuroscience of Politics
This season of the Brain Blown Podcast has been duly named "The Neuroscience of Human Connection."
And in our final episode of the season, we decided to take a closer look at one of the biggest threats to that connection (for Americans, at least...)
Politics.
As it turns out, even our political standings can be traced back to our brains and how we use them. In this episode, Laine presents some fascinating research around
in-group and out-group thinking
how things like emotion, memory, and discomfort can sway a vote
and the truth behind one of the most confusing questions in politics:
... how republicans manage to convince a poorer audience to vote in favor of the rich, and why liberals can't seem to convince anybody to do anything.
Our hope is that you'll leave this episode with a better understanding of the opposing side (whatever side that may be for you), and learn a little more about why that side thinks, acts, and believes what they do.
Who knows, maybe it'll lead to some healthy conversation in the future.
___
After this episode, we'll be taking a short, seasonal break to regroup and prepare for season 2!
So if you have any topics you'd be interested in learning more about, please feel free to send us an email at info@brainblownpodcast.com!
We'd love to hear from you.
Timestamps:
0:55 Intro
6:38 What is Politics?
12:11 Politics & The Brain
12:36 Emotion
15:01 Anxiety & Enthusiasm
16:15 Anger
17:12 In-group vs Out-group
24:24 Memory
29:44 Pain & Discomfort
30:23 Intelligence
32:26 Interactive Complexity
38:34 Morality
43:38 The truth behind Politic's most confusing questions
47:18 Politics through a Neuroscience lens
53:41 Why we're talking about this
58:57 Why do we care + What do we do about it
References:
Behave by Robert Sapolsky
Matthew D. Lieberman and Darren Schreiber Matthew D. Lieberman and Darren Schreiber - "Is Political Cognition Like Riding a Bicycle? How Cognitive Neuroscience Can Inform Research on Political Thinking"
Published by Cambridge University - Rt Hon Lord Owen CH FRCP Book Review
Leonie Huddy - "Chapter 9: On the Distinct Political Effects of Anxiety and Anger" (From the book The Affect Effect: Dynamics of Emotion in Political Thinking and Behavior)
Jan Slaby - "Neuroscience and Politics: Do Not Hold your Breath"
D. Schreiber - "Social Attribution: Implications of recent cognitive neuroscience research for race, law, and politics"
Toward a Neuroscience of Politics by David B. Arciniegas, M.D., C. Alan Anderson, M.D.
M. Holmes - "International Politics at the Brain's Edge: Social Neuroscience and a New 'Via Media'"
MF Mendez - "A Neurology of the Conservative-Liberal Dimension of Political Ideology"
S Krastev - "Do Political and Economic Choices Rely on Common Neural Substrates? A Systematic Review of the Emerging Neuropolitics Literature"
General Outline of Episode
Empathy, safety, racism, relationships, mindfulness, music
This is the neuroscience of Politics
What is it?
Merriam Webster: the art or science of government
Google: the activities associated with the governance of a country or other area, especially the debate or conflict among individuals or parties having or hoping to achieve power.
Aristotle is credited with having first used the word when he wrote about Politika or affairs of the cities
Robert Saplosky states that “France de waal introduced the term politics into primitology with his classic book chimpanzee politics, using it in the sense of Machiavellian intelligence, nonhuman primates struggling in a socially complex manner to control access to resources. The book documents chimpanzee genius for such maneuvering. This is politics in the traditional human sense as well. But I will use a more restricted, starry-eyed sense, which is politics being the struggle among the powerful with differing views on the common good. Forget liberals accusing conservatives of waging war on the poor. Ditto conservatives accusing those depraved liberals of destroying family values. Cutting through this posturing will assume that everyone equally desires that people do as well as possible, but differs as to how best to accomplish this.”
Politics, even when we try to identify it becomes, if you will, political.
So it should be no suprise that trying to explore politics and the brain is also political - and thus divided.
Jan Slaby, a philosopher, in the article Neuroscience and Politics: Do Not Hold your Breath states the argument that it's difficult to analyze how our brain would be involved in politics in a way that is not “clearly false nor evidently trivial. To claim some significant role of neuronal processes in the enabling of political attitudes, decisions, and behavior is truistic, to say the least. To make much more specific claims, let alone claims about a determining or a strongly explanatory relationship between identifiable neural goings-on and political phenomena, would, at the present state of the science, easily slip into obvious falsity or gross overclaim”
Essentially this states that while it makes sense to want to look at the brain to make sense of politics, politics are too complex and we know too little of the brain. Selby is a bit of a critique of the field of neuroscience at all to be fair.
Holmes however argues that the problem is that we try to simplify things too much. And in fact just as we know that the mind affects the brain and the brain affects the mind, Holmes will argue that social interactions also impact the brain and that the idea of neuroplasticity is an important thing to not forget.
“That is, if politics is reflected in the brain, then the interesting part is not the reflection per se, but rather what caused the reflection in the first place.”
He’s arguing that if the brain rewires itself in response to what it experiences, then the structure it has rewired itself into is the important point to look at.
This, in of itself is a challenge to how we think of things. “If the brain is constantly rewiring itself in response to the environment and the mind, human nature at the very least is not static, nor is it fixed or determined”.
Politics is one of the last areas to connect to neuroscience
Disclaimer!! - Not a lot of studies, newer studies (hard to see over time), and complex - who is in these studies
In short politics in the brain is hard. It's hard because so many things impact our decisions and those choices, much like our brains, become plastic and malleable.
So what is impacting this plastic?
What is politics and the brain?
—What impacts the brain for politics includes but is not limited to anger, anxiety, empathy, memory, hunger, intelligence, disgust, pain, and scent
Emotion and Politics
Throughout our history, many political leaders have been assassinated, so its likely no surprise that emotion impacts politics.
Gazzaniga’s studies show the impact of what emotion does to action, demonstrating repeated instances where post doing a behavior, people will then create a narrative of why they did the thing, even when this can be proven to be behavior “driven by factors outside their conscious awareness”
Drew Westen, a clinical and political psychologist ‘the political brain is an emotional brain. It is not a dispassionate calculating machine, objectively searching for the right facts, figures and policies to make a reasoned decision.’ he goes on to state ‘Republicans understand what the philosopher, David Hume, recognized three centuries ago: that reason is a slave to emotion, not the other way around.” And he argues democrats have historically “clung tenaciously to the dispassionate view of the mind and to the campaign strategy that logically follows from it, namely one that focuses on facts, figures, policy statements, costs, and benefits, and appeals to intellect and expertise’
Owen cites emotion impacting even just the identity - citing a brain imaging study, focused on swing voters, in 2007, which found ‘Voters sense both peril and promise in party brands’. Specifically, the words ‘Democrat’, ‘Republican’, and ‘Independent’ caused activation in the amygdala, but also demonstrated activity in the ventral striatum, which is known to fire with reward
George Marcus and Michael MacKuen have stated a theory of affective intelligence looking specifically at effect, anxiety, and enthusiasm and how this impacts someone politically. Simply their research shows that anxiety will cause interest in political matters but will stop people from making decisions.
Enthusiasm impact active interest and involvement. Seems simple enough
Sapolsky “Consider the genetic influence on voter participation, the mediating factor between the two turns out to be a sense of control and efficacy. People who vote regularly feel their actions matter, and this central locus of control reflects some genetically influenced personality traits example high optimism and low neuroticism.
Huddy, Felman, and Cassess looked into this in-depth - approach and avoidance. Specifically studying Americans - it has been shown that those who feel anxiety have demonstrated greater interest, and want to learn more about the positions of a candidate - that being said anxiety often impacts our ability to learn and remember, so it's driving the need to learn but not the ability to learn
Anger also impacts us in politics
Anger impacts us when negative events seem clear and very likely to happen and us doing something will have an impact and Anxiety is more feeling a lack of control or having a lack of impact
Anger produces action whereas anxiety leads to avoidance
But as we’ve learned anxiety is not a great place to learn and anger is not a great place to respond
“Mackie and colleagues (2000) also find that anger at an outgroup strongly predicts a desire to argue with, oppose, and attack outgroup members.”
Us Vs Thems
The neuroscience of humans is to be the neuroscience of groups - we exist to be in relationship with others but quickly when we define ourselves as a group its easy for there to be another group - thus creating the Us Vs Thems
Eberhardt’s study shows that Neuroimaging studies show our brains respond very differently to those who are us vs those we think of as themes
Sherif in 1961 did an experiment on 22 boys in the fifth grade while they were at summer camp. They split them into two groups but didn’t tell them that another group existed. Each group created great in-group cohesion and worked well together but when they combined the two groups friction arose. However, once there was a project with a goal that benefited everyone did that friction diminished.
Molenberghs in 2012 expanded on a study of ingroup/outgroup thoughts. In the study participants were assigned to red and blue teams. To increase group unification, the teams engaged in a task. During the task, participants were told to press a button faster than the opposing team member. A follow-up experiment these participants watched this on video and judged who pressed the button the fastest. Generally speaking participants on average judged the in-group member pressing the button faster, however, what they didn’t know was the video had been altered so each person on the video was pressing the button at exactly the same speed.
Molenberghs did an additional experiment and measured participants’ brain responses while they watched the video clips - participants in the study that had demonstrated an in-group bias also showed an increase in the inferior parietal lobule. This area has been shown to be critical in perception-action coupling. This increase happened when watching in-group members vs out-group members. What this confirms is that people actually see the actions of in-group members differently than those of out-group members.
Empathy also changes - and is even impacted by how much we might like an out-group. Cikara and Fiske (2011) study demonstrated that when negative events happen to out-group members that participants don’t think highly of, like drug addicts, we feel less empathy specifically demonstrated by less anterior insula activation. However, the same events to an out-group members that participants felt pity for like the elderly, changes this.
What does this look like in politics? Drew Westin in a study in 2004 of 15 committed Democrats and 15 committed Republicans taken in the last month of the Presidential Campaign studied subjects that were shown slides of their favored candidate contradicting the other candidate. The individuals in the study could find and identify contradictions made by the rival party candidate, they could also identify them if neutral figures did, but they were unable to recognize when their own candidate was either lying or misrepresenting the facts.
Mendez “In a novel study of language use among partisan Twitter followers, those following Republicans, presumed the more politically conservative, use more words emphasizing group membership (in-group identity, national identity, religion), first-person plural pronouns, tentative words, and references to achievement, government, law, and opponents. Those following Democrats, presumed the more liberal, use more emotional words (feeling-related, anxiety-related, positive emotions, expletives) and first-person singular pronouns, as well as references to uniqueness, culture, and entertainment. The most differentiating word, however, is the greater use of the article “the” among conservatives, possibly suggesting a greater emphasis on authority or formality (e.g., “the” Methodists or “the” African Americans).”
Empathy
Schreiber also explores empathy - specifically Theory of mind,
Episode 2 this is the ability to attribute mental states to ourselves and others
When we assume another’s mental state based on what we observe
the medial prefrontal cortex of the brain (a region directly behind the middle of the forehead)
Memory
Episodic memory and Semantic memory
Jordain - the neuroscience of music - Semantic memory is concerned with the inherent nature of phenomenon with meaning episodic memory with actual instances of its occurrence with episodes. Knowing that frogs are slimy is an example of somatic memory remembering the time someone put a frog in your bed is an example of episodic memory. Similarly, memories of the many ways in which drums are used in rock music are somatic, the memory of exactly how it drums were used in particular songs with a Rolling Stone is episodic.”
Lieberman states “Political issues are often relevant to us precisely because of the personal experiences we have had (e.g., discrimination) that are encoded as episodic memories. Similarly, the facts that we learn about any issue are likely to be stored as semantic memories. Thus, the extent to which the lateral versus the medial temporal cortex is active during political attitude assessments may reveal the extent to which individuals retrieve personal experiences or learned facts; moreover, these activities can be measured without ever asking participants to list the thoughts relevant to their attitude”
McClelland states “The cortex is structured to slowly learn regularities, whereas the structure of the hippocampus makes it an ideal candidate for storing episodic records of experience. They built a computational model based on the neural architecture of these brain regions and showed that together these systems can underlie many commonly studied learning and memory phenomena.” This is important because it explains a bit about why it can be so difficult to change ingrained patterns of thinking, regardless of that incident where we learned that our long-held beliefs were not true
This impacts our in-group/out-group thinking - specifically arguing that these changes happen slowly and require repeated experiences recalling what we covered in the neuroscience of racism - can we change this? Yes Is it easy? No McClelland says “Even though one might be able to remember a specific episode in which members of stereotyped groups did not act stereotypically, the cortical representations underlying the stereotype cannot be modified rapidly. A substantial change of these representations would require many more counter-stereotypic experiences.” Remember that one rose that stung us really badly? Its going to take a lot of roses to make us feel better about roses even if roses are in and of themselves neutral
Pain, Discomfort, bad scent
Sapolsky “People sit in a room with smelly garbage, they become more conservative about social issues without changing their opinions on say foreign policy or economics” and “This helps explain conservatives being more likely than liberals to have cleaning supplies in their bedroom.
Sapolsky also cites Theodore Adorno who as early as the 1950s stated that lower intelligence predicts conservative ideology. Saplosy states that some but not all studies since have supported this conclusion. What he cites as a more proven cause has been the connection between lower intelligence and right-wing authoritarianism
In a study of 15,000 subjects in the UK and the United States, they were able to show the correlation and causation between low IQ, right-wing authoritarianism, and intergroup prejudices. It is argued that this happens because right-wing authoritarianism provides simple answers, which for individuals with poor abstract reasoning skills is needed.
Phillip Tetlock of the University of Pennsylvania argues this is impacted by the ability to do interactive complexity. A lack of interactive complexity will cause the body to become anxious or uncomfortable with ambiguity. Those who can engage in interactive complexity are more likely to be able to approach ambiguity with an open mind, looking for alternative options, and seeing the big picture. An example of this is found in a study where conservatives and liberals were both asked about poverty. Both liberals and conservatives would state that people are poor because they're lazy. However, this was only true if they had to respond very quickly. If the participants were given a longer amount of time, people who could engage with interactive completely would look at a variety of options such as how it's difficult to find a good-paying job if you can’t afford nice clothes, or schooling, or daycare or reliable transportation, or a variety of other things.
Sapolsky “Conservatism starts gut and stays gut and liberals go from gut to head”. And states this is pretty reliable and states the reason for this is that “Liberals and conservatives are equally capable of thinking past gut personal attributions to subtler situation ones when asked to do so, both are equally adept at dispassionately presenting the viewpoints of the opposite camp. It's that liberals are more motivated to push toward situational explanations” Their values lie differently whereas conservatives don’t have the same disconnect
Linda Shinske of the University of Illinois argues that a snap judgment is going to cause a liberal person to be more likely to experience dissonance because it's at odds with their values, beliefs, or principles, so they are more likely to engage with interactive complexity to try to identify why. Conservatives are just less likely to experience that dissonance
However, because interactive complexity is taxing on any brain, if the brain’s cognitive load is increased, this becomes more complicated and less likely to happen. We see this in studies that show people become more conservative when tired, in pain, distracted with a cognitive task, or when blood alcohol levels rise. Or in a room with something that smells bad.
Interactive complexity is taxing on the brain, which also means it requires energy! As we know the brain requires 25% of energy regularity, and higher areas of the frontal cortex have a higher glucose demand to work. For this reason, when people are hungry they score more selfishly on economic games. Also in a study of “more than 1100 judicial rulings prisoners were granted parole at about 60% right when the judges had recently eaten and essentially at a 0% rate just before the judges ate.”
Another question is how we define morality. Jonathan Height at NYU argues 6 foundations of morality - care versus harm, fairness versus cheating, liberty versus oppression, loyalty versus betrayal, authoritarian versus subversion, and sanctuary versus degradation. Data shows that liberals value care and fairness. Conservatives value loyalty, and authoritarianism, and both groups value liberty. “Can we be critical of the government - if you’re conservative it's seen as disloyal, leftists will argue that it can be justified, especially if the government is causing harm? Can you break the law? Let's say illegal immigration - Conservatives will argue no because of the value of authority, but leftists might argue for it if reporting on someone is here illegally because they face death at home.
Mendez “Those who are very conservative emphasize loyalty to the in-group, submission to authority, and a sense of purity, whereas those who are very liberal emphasize minimizing harm to others and maximizing fairness.”
Memory impacts and negativity bias is impacted here - conservatives have been shown to remember more negative than positive information - is it any wonder everyone is running schmear campaigns
Negativity biases again also impact the viewing of neutral faces, the response to something that feels threatening with more violence, and a goal to more that is something that is safe
Liberals will argue everyone has equal rights to happiness, conservatives will “instead discount fairness in favor of exponent authority, generating the classic conservative view that some social economic inequality is a tolerable price for running things smoothly.” Conservatives state liberals are morally impoverished. Joshua Greene of Harvard states what is really occurring is liberals have a more refined moral foundation. Likely connected to interactive complexity - the use of interactive complexity expands on what one is told is moral to what one can thoroughly sus out as moral, but when we are left to identify this for ourselves that creates ambiguity. Conservatives and liberals can agree on a lot of what is moral, however, once ambiguity comes into play, conservatives are more likely to become anxious by this. Conservatives are known to want closure, dislike novelty, and find comfort in structure and hierarchy. Ambiguity confuses this.
Saplosky states “the conservative dislike of ambiguity has been demonstrated in numerous political contexts, responses to visual illustrations, taste, and entertainment, and is closely related to the differentiating feelings about novelty, which by definition invokes ambiguity and uncertainty. These differing views of novelty certainly explain the liberal view that with correct reforms our best days are ahead of us in a novel future, whereas conservatives view our best days as behind us, in familiar circumstances that should be returned, to make things great again.”
Saplosy argues that the conservative need for predictability and structure gives insight into something that has confused political philosophers for a long time, which is that over the 50 years Republicans have been able to convince poor white Americans to vote Republican, a vote that benefits the rich and not the poor? He argues that “the psychological issues of needing structure familiarity show that for poor whites, voting republican constitutes an implicit active system justification and risk aversion. Better to resist change and deal with the devil you know.”
By nature life is filled with ambiguity, the future is unknown, and a lot of things are yet to pass, the more the unknown makes us anxious the more it will seem threatening. And studies have shown that conservatives react more quickly to threats than liberals do - perhaps because of a heightened amygdala. “Conservatives are more likely to associate arms with weapons rather than with legs, more likely to interpret ambiguous faces as threatening, and more easily conditioned to associate negative but not positive stimuli with neutral stimuli. Republicans report three times as many nightmares as Democrats, particularly ones involving loss of political personal power. As the saying goes a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged. Related to this terror management theory, suggesting that conservatism is psychologically rooted in pronounced fear of death, supporting this is the finding that priming people to think about their morality makes them more conservative.” However, despite all of this it was found in a multi-national study that conservatives were happier than liberals. As economic inequality rises the happiness gap between the right in left increases. The more we are stressed or in pain, the more comfort we find in simplicity, a reduction in ambiguity, and a reduction in a need for change.
What goes on in the Brain
Mendez's studies are showing that extreme differences in politics are not just about how much money your family makes, what your culture is or what you’ve learned but are also connected to memory, how you perceive, how you are able to problem solve, in other words, your brain
Which makes sense because we know that the first part will also shape the second part - the society around us as the ability to wire us, because neuroplasticity
So let's talk about what’s going on - in case we want to change it? Because people change themselves all the time
In Group - Out-group bias - Sapolsky “it seems that in-group bias is not a result of a modulation of a single brain region. Rather, in-group bias develops as a result of a modulation of the neural correlates involved in a specific task. Large networks, such as those involved in Theory of Mind (Carrington and Bailey, 2008; Van Overwalle and Baetens, 2009; Bzdok et al., 2012), perception–action coupling (Molenberghs et al., 2009; Van Overwalle and Baetens, 2009; Molenberghs et al., 2012a), face perception (Fusar-Poli et al., 2009) and empathy (Fan et al., 2011; Bzdok et al., 2012) all seem to be modulated by group membership (Fig. 1).”
Insula and insular cortex - Insula sits on top of the amygdala and the hippocampus
Sapolsky “ Back to the insular cortex and its role in mediating gas territory and olfactory disgust in mammals and mediating moral disgust in humans…you can reliably stroke hatred of them by making them seem viscerally disgusting. When people's insula activates at the thought of them you can check one thing off your genocide To Do List.” Specifically what we see is that conservatives have a lower threshold for disgust than liberals. However, if we take a person who identifies as liberal and make them tired hungry rushed, distracted, or disgusted and they become more conservative. On the flip side if we are able to have a person who identifies as conservative more detached about something viscerally disturbing and become more liberal. Sapolsky “If it makes you puke then you rebuke.” but argues this is very tricky because what we find disgusting now we didn’t before - and cities this is a moving target. Slavery wasn’t something we found disgusting a hundred years ago.
Cingulate Cortex -all of the skin on your inside fingers and palm
Saplosky “Liberalism has been associated with larger amounts of grey matter in the cingulate cortex with its involvement in empathy, whereas conservatism has been associated with an enlarged amygdala, with of course it's a starring role in threat perception. Moreover, there's more amygdala activation in conservativism than liberals when viewing a disgusting image or doing a risky task”.
Anterior Cingulate Cortex - fingers that touch your thumb - empathy, impulse control, emotion, decision making
A recent study using electroencephalographs has found that greater liberalism is associated with stronger conflict-related anterior cingulate brain activity and claims to be the first ‘connecting individual differences in political ideology to a basic neurocognitive mechanism for self-regulation’ (Amodio et al., 2007
Mendez “there is emerging evidence for a specific neurobiological circuitry that involves a right-sided anterior brain “conservative-complex” for the preservation of the status quo and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and left prefrontal cortex (PFC) roles in responding to change and promoting approach.”
What does this look like - again Mendez is also looking at the fact that your brain on conservatism means you feel a need for safety, stability, for things to be the same, for order and structure to be high preferences. In your brain on liberalism, we see a higher need for creativity, newness, uniqueness, and novelty.
Again this goes back to interactive complexity - when you are in a space to think liberally it means you can tolerate interactive complexity - the unknown, the disorganized, cognitive conflicts
Mendez cites this in a study of politics in art where conservatives showed a general preference toward traditional art and liberals more toward abstract
“Avoidance of negative stimuli” might be the reason why on this
Mendez “Evolutionary psychologists stress that politics and alliances are necessary in order to influence one’s position in social groups and the direction of one’s group4 and have proposed the parasite-stress theory as a major driving force for the evolution of conservatism-liberalism.26,27 The parasite-stress theory views people as having inherited parasitically modified behavioral tendencies aimed at avoiding those who bring the greatest risk of infection and transmitted disease to one’s social group. Those who do not conform to in-group norms and members of outgroups with unfamiliar cultures and behaviors bring the greatest risk of infection and are avoided the most. In other words, parasitic stress may promote in-group collectivism or “groupishness” and group social norms, as well as conservative social and sexual attitudes and distrust of strangers,all of which defend against the effects of parasites.”
Why do we see this - higher amounts of activity in the insula - the more disgusted we are by a body infected the less likely we are to engage with a parasite
Mendez “Just showing people disease-related images can lead to increasing feelings of avoidance, and inducing disgust with disgusting images or sensations can both boost the physiological immune response and increase prejudice to outgroups.”
Mendez “A few studies have reported an association between specific genes and conservative-liberal behavior or with political attitudes. Genes encoding certain receptors to dopamine, specifically the DRD4 gene on the chromosome, were associated with variations in conservative-liberal personality traits. Two large studies have linked variations in the DRD4 exon III tandem repeats to political ideology putatively based on the sensitivity to dopamine uptake and the need for higher dopamine. Among 1,771 students in Singapore, those with two copies of the 4-repeat allele on the DRD4 gene were more politically conservative, and among another group of 1,941 individuals, those with 7R+tandem repeats, in the context of having more friends, were more politically liberal.”
Mendez says when we combine this - the studies on evolution, parasites, moral foundation, and the genetic study - they meet together specifically on a negativity bias - conservatives will have a higher response and a more likely to avoid - it captures their attention at a higher rate and they have a higher response to it citing “On eye-tracking of negative images, political conservatives, compared with political liberals, are faster to fixate on them, spend more time gazing at them, and have a stronger tendency to move away from them.”
Mendez “Neuroimaging studies suggest that political ideology involves conservative-liberal differences in the amygdala, insula, and Anterior cingulate cortex” citing “An MRI study of 90 young adults shows that political conservatives, compared with political liberals, have greater gray matter in the right amygdala, and an fMRI study involving a risk-taking task shows that political conservatives have greater activity in the right amygdala. The association of political conservatism with the right amygdala, a structure that is bilaterally sensitive to emotional saliency, especially fear, suggests increased processing of potential signals for threat. Although the anterior insula has a prominent role in the experience of disgust, brain responses to disgusting stimuli may show a more distributed pattern of differences between political conservatism and liberalism, consistent with differential sensitivity for disgust among political conservatives. The unexpected association of political liberalism with activity in the left posterior insula in one study may reflex an additional role of the insula in the expression of interpersonal trust. Finally, political liberals have greater gray matter and increased ERP activity in the ACC, consistent with a sensitivity for processing signals for potential change. Several areas of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) are additionally implicated in political ideology. The inferior frontal gyrus, particularly on the right, may be directly involved in risk aversion. Activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), which has a role in emotionally based experiences that are “positive” or “negative”, increases when just thinking about political issues, and there is both VMPFC and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DMPFC) activity when taking the perspective of one’s own political candidate. The DMPFC further participates when there is a need for emotional regulation about politics, such as when focusing on opposing politicians or their faces, processing implicit measures of party membership bias, or associating one’s own candidate with unpleasant words. Although not consistent, the right DLPFC may have a greater role in resolving good versus bad biases, partisan differences, or conflicts between fairness and self-interest and, in one fMRI study, there was a clear association of right DLPFC activation with political conservatism.
“This literature, although variable and often flawed, suggests the existence of a “conservative complex” in the right anterior brain (see Figure 1). Recognizing that there is a neurobiological basis for conservatism-liberalism does not mean that life experiences and social learning are not major determinants, or that the neurobiological underpinnings determine, rather than reflect, conservative versus liberal attitudes.”
The role of the medial prefrontal cortex in social categorization was also recently confirmed in two fMRI studies in which people had to categorize in-group versus out-group words (Molenberghs and Morrison, 2012; Morrisonet al., 2012). Viewing in-group versus out-group words that participants chose themselves and which they were familiar with led to increased activation in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex (Morrison et al., 2012). authors suggested that the difference in ventral and dorsal medial prefrontal cortex between the existing and newly-created groups was because the ventral part of the medial prefrontal cortex has been previously implicated in emotional social reasoning while the more dorsal part has been implicated in more abstract social reasoning (Saxe, 2006; Van Overwalle, 2009). This makes sense given the fact that we have a more emotional bond with the groups that we are familiar with (Molenberghs and Morrison, 2012). The ventral medial prefrontal cortex is also the region typically associated with self-referential processing (Northoff et al., 2006), which suggests that meaningful groups are more closely related to our personal identity than arbitrary ones (Molenberghs and Morrison, 2012)
Arciniegas argues that the studies we’ve seen demonstrate a possibility towards people being more liberal engaging more with the left hemisphere, which is argued to be consistent with the left hemisphere’s openness for approach and conservatives more towards the right “This is a recurring theme in the neurology of behavior, not only with respect to elementary neurobehavioral functions like handedness, language, memory, praxis, and visuospatial function, but also one echoed in many of the aforementioned articles describing the neuropsychiatry of other highly evolved experiences and endeavors like creativity, humor, spirituality, and law and justice.”
Why we are talking about it
We started this series with what binds us together, on the flip side of that coin this is about what separates or disconnects us
Krastev “Political choice matters. Whether expressed in the voting booth or in response to a pollster, individual choices collectively influence the direction of public policy and ultimately the well-being of society and the individuals that compose it”
People’s engagement in politics impacts us as a society
Who we were in tribes - who we are now? How much has changed? How much do we want our future to change?
Why do we care?
Holmes “The problem is not that individuals are not generally self-interested or not generally for maximizing domination; they may very well be, particularly under certain conditions that may be predictable. But the lack of a fixed human nature would suggest that scholars can no longer take such perspectives as assumptions. The claims become empirical ones. It is possible that individual brains come wired for self-interest or power-maximization. But we now know that this may be rewired over time.”
What do we do about it?
Saplosky“In some cultures, negative attitudes toward some individuals or out-groups might be more socially acceptable than in others, which would, in turn, modulate the individual’s executive control over his or her in-group biases. Developmental differences can also influence the neural correlates involved in group membership perception. For example, when a child grows up in a family that has strong negative attitudes toward a certain group it will be difficult to inhibit these implicit negative attitudes in adulthood.
Richardson and Cunningham show that perceptions, thoughts, and feelings - can be impacted
It feels like this happens subconsciously and it does but an important thing about neuroplasticity is how we make the unconscious, conscious
