I suspect from time to time, we’ve all wondered what’s wrong with the brains of conservatives. We know that they confine themselves to a bubble of disinformation because that disinformation is precisely what they want to hear.
But a more empirical question to ask is whether there is a difference in how the brains of liberals and conservatives process information. This is a question that researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University sought to answer. The lead researchers are Yuan Chang Leong, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley, and Jamil Zaki, a professor at Stanford.
Subjects who had answered questionnaires in order to be able to classify their political orientation were shown political ads having to do specifically with immigration policy, mentioning lots of highly charged hot-button terms, while their brains were being monitored by an MRI. One question to address is whether the difference lies in lower or higher brain function. The researchers studied the visual and auditory cortical areas, responsible for signal processing for those senses, as well as the pre-frontal cortex, responsible for the interpretation of narratives. Perhaps not surprisingly, there were no significant differences between liberals and conservatives on how their brains processed the sensory input. The differences were all in the interpretation, occurring in a region of the brain called the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex.
The researchers found that the use of words related to risk and threat, and to morality and emotions, led to greater polarization in the study participants' neural responses.
An example of a risk-related statement was, "I think it's very dangerous, because what we want is cooperation amongst the cities and the federal government to ensure that we have safety in our communities, and to ensure that our citizens are protected."
Meanwhile, an example of a moral-emotional statement was, "What are the fundamental ethical principles that are the basis of our society? Do no harm, and be compassionate, and this federal policy violates both of these principles."
Overall, the research study's results suggest that political messages that use threat-related and moral-emotional language drive partisans to interpret the same message in opposite ways, contributing to increasing polarization, Leong said.
So liberals and conservatives hear the same words and images but interpret them as supporting opposite policies. Knowing that liberals and conservatives base their policy proposals on different sets of “facts” (we’ve got the actual facts; they’ve got Kellyane’s “alternative facts”), perhaps this is not too surprising.
On the other hand, the fact that this is all happening at a high level of brain function means that these differences are not necessary permanent. These are habits of thought, and while habits might be hard to break, they can be broken. There is hope, but it requires conservatives leave their bubbles, which is something that they are quite passionate about.
I would have to wonder if there is involvement of other portions o the brain as well. Partisans have strong emotional reactions to these issues, which would involve the limbic system of the brain. The report doesn’t identify the limbic system as a target for study, but that seems to me an obvious choice for extension of the study. After all, voters vote more with their hearts than their brains.
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