Brain scans to reveal political affiliations: nature vs nurture

[Mao]

If you want to know people’s politics, tradition said to study their parents. In fact, the party affiliation of someone’s parents can predict the child’s political leanings about around 70 percent of the time.

But new research, published yesterday in the journal PLOS ONE, suggests what mom and dad think isn’t the endgame when it comes to shaping a person’s political identity. Ideological differences between partisans may reflect distinct neural processes, and they can predict who’s right and who’s left of center with 82.9 percent accuracy, outperforming the “your parents pick your party” model. It also out-predicts another neural model based on differences in brain structure, which distinguishes liberals from conservatives with 71.6 percent accuracy.

The study matched publicly available party registration records with the names of 82 American participants whose risk-taking behavior during a gambling experiment was monitored by brain scans. The researchers found that liberals and conservatives don’t differ in the risks they do or don’t take, but their brain activity does vary while they’re making decisions.

The idea that the brains of Democrats and Republicans may be hard-wired to their beliefs is not new. Previous research has shown that during MRI scans, areas linked to broad social connectedness, which involves friends and the world at large, light up in Democrats’ brains. Republicans, on the other hand, show more neural activity in parts of the brain associated with tight social connectedness, which focuses on family and country.

Other scans have shown that brain regions associated with risk and uncertainty, such as the fear-processing amygdala, differ in structure in liberals and conservatives. And different architecture means different behavior. Liberals tend to seek out novelty and uncertainty, while conservatives exhibit strong changes in attitude to threatening situations. The former are more willing to accept risk, while the latter tends to have more intense physical reactions to threatening stimuli.

Building on this, the new research shows that Democrats exhibited significantly greater activity in the left insula, a region associated with social and self-awareness, during the task. Republicans, however, showed significantly greater activity in the right amygdala, a region involved in our fight-or flight response system.

“If you went to Vegas, you won’t be able to tell who’s a Democrat or who’s a Republican, but the fact that being a Republican changes how your brain processes risk and gambling is really fascinating,” says lead researcher Darren Schreiber, a University of Exeter professor who’s currently teaching at Central European University in Budapest. “It suggests that politics alters our worldview and alters the way our brains process.”

Politics isn’t the first to cause structural changes in the brain. More than a decade ago, researchers used brain scans to show that London cab drivers’ gray matter grew larger to help them store a mental map of the city. There more time they spent on the road, the bigger their hippocampi, an area associated with navigation, became.

This implies that despite the political leanings seen through our brains, how we vote—and thus the cause of our political affiliations—may not be set in stone, Schreiber says.

“If we believe that we’re hardwired for our political views, then it’s really easy for me to discount in you in a conversation. ‘Oh, you’re just a conservative because you have a red brain,’ or ‘Oh, you’re a liberal because you have a blue brain,’” Schreiber explains. “But that’s just not the case. The brain changes. The brain is dynamic.”

So, the brain is dynamic, and certain entrenched beliefs will help reinforce those beliefs physically (in terms of brain structure). However, we are much closer to discovering the process at which certain beliefs take hold. Perhaps we'll have a quantitative argument for nature vs nurture sometime in the next few decades.

[slothpomba]

Actual study for the lazy.

I think we need to be careful about the whole US centric nature of it. For one, the lines are usually a lot sharper. For two, i'm sure the culture and enviroment you live in as a whole does have a massive effect on your psychology, so, this would only be true for a specific place (the USA) and a specific time (the 21st century). I think it would be interesting to see if they could replicate it across other cultures.

Our political centre of gravity is in a different place compared to the USA. Roughly 50% of Aussies support our "right wing"/"conservative party" but it doesn't have the same nature as the counterpart party, the republicans, in the USA, even though the numbers and split is roughly the same.

I think it's also important to note the direction they're saying it's caused in. It's not so much people with a specific brain structure will vote for X, rather that believing or thinking Y will change your brain. This isn't really new. Drawing on things like depression research, many people know a malfunction in the brain in one way or another will cause people to become depressed, i don't want to use the word "chemical imbalance" because that theory is horribly outdated but like that. So, basically, changes in your brain will make you sad. We're seeing a bit of evidence now that it can also work the other way, if you're under a lot of prolonged stress or socially isolated or other situations like that, these emotions can feedback and change your brain.

It actually relates to an issue in philosophy called "peer disagreement" as well. If you have two people who are intellectual and cognitive equals, why do people make different choices? My focus is on religion, so, there is an example for instance. There are many people who are just as smart, intelligent and considered than us and they made a different choice, why? So, i guess conceivably, we could put down at least a little of that disagreement to neural aspects like this.