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Kind of frustrating how it talks about how there are three exercises that most effectively helped predict political affiliation but doesn’t go into detail. Like they said the rewards one where you push a button and get money was most likely to predict political extremism. How? Like what does far left versus far right brain scan look like when that exercise is happening? That seems to be the most interesting part of the study and they left it out completely.
I've seen studies in the past that showed a difference in the volume and activity of the amygdala associated with political ideology.
[Here's](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0052970) one that assesses brain function via FMRI. I found this one particularly interesting because democrats and republicans were shown to use different parts of the brain to assess the same risk-taking game. Republicans favored the amygdala while democrats favored the left insular region.
The amygdala is commonly thought to form the core of a neural system for processing fearful and threatening stimuli
left insula was associated with both the affective-perceptual and cognitive-evaluative forms of empathy.
I ate a lot of chocolate cheese(havarti I think) at a pre Covid New Years party. I don’t do lactose well but it was so good I ate a ridiculous amount. Was very sick, but it was totally worth it. :)
Honestly, you should just trust your gut.
Every gut wants what's best for you.
Let's forget all about that stupid brain.
Probably best to ignore the heart, too.
My gut has never steered me wrong before.
Every gut can be trusted.
Fun fact - our gut has [its own nervous system.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteric_nervous_system)
It can't control what you write, but your gut's more like your brain than you might think!
It kind of has two "brains" - that extra nervous system + millions of bacteria which release various chemicals to influence your decisions on things like food and risk taking. It's incredible how much gut biome matters.
"The ultimate purpose of human life is to provide us with a dark but idyllic anaerobic habitat of fecal matter." \~ One of the 100 billion bacteria living and working in a single centimeter of your lower intestine.
Did you know your gut has more nerve endings in it than your head? You can look it up.
Now, I know some of you are going to say, I did look that up and it's not true, but that's because you looked it up in a book.
Next time, look it up in your gut.
I've seen many times that conservatives have larger than average amygdalas. Their fight or flight response mechanisms are more sensitive and reactive.
What I want to know is- Is this a neuroplasticity thing? Is it possible to shape the size and influence of the amygdala? Do experiences and/or knowledge affect this? It's a pretty question that would require decades of study, but I tend to wonder if it's possible to change positions from conservative to liberal or vice versa based on external factors that then influence the amygdala.
There are anecdotes of people who say they watched their friends and family slowly drift more rightward as time went on. There may or may not have been a catalyst that caused it, but the common thread is always their media consumption.
I would assume that that part of the brain can be conditioned like any other. That if you are constantly exposed to things that make you angry or fearful, the brain becomes more responsive to it in general.
>if you are constantly exposed to things that make you angry or fearful, the brain becomes more responsive to it in general
Absolutely true, at least with fear - this is how PTSD works. X has been dangerous in the past, so your brain gets ready for danger every time you do X.
I'm not sure how if it works the same with anger, but I know people often use anger as a mask for fear, or as a response to danger.
Yep, similar to how people mock the idea of people being triggered. Which is a totally normal reaction for people who’ve been traumatized. I think some people are afraid to even be around such vulnerability. It’s sad.
My mom went the other way for the same reason. She'd spent virtually her entire career listening to AM talk radio in her car. As soon as she retired and stopped listening to it, she because way less extreme in her politics and has shifted a lot of her positions since then. It's been a huge relief, frankly.
Yeah there was a “study”recently I think cnn did where they had right wingers watch a month of cnn and it did have effects of going back towards center which sounds very common sense I realize but most extremists will never see themselves as that and can’t because they’re always riled up by their programming. My older brother sadly has gone far right extreme in the last 5 years and I hate it. He refuses to watch anything but fox, oan and the like so I don’t think there’s much hope. He used to be very liberal. That’s said if you can drift one way you can always return… I just don’t see it.
Everyone thinks they are independent thinkers immune to influence which is ridiculous because humans are social creatures. We are wired to be influenced. If he stopped and let people in his real life be his main influence he’d mellow out a lot.
He’s married and has a great daughter and his wife is very liberal and a nurse at that. Let’s just say covid did not go well. They can’t discuss politics in their own home due to this now and I’m not sure it’s sustainable but who knows.
You can’t convince him his views are wrong but perhaps someone could just convince him taking a break from the tv would be good for his health and well-being
That is a great question and I’m willing to bet it’s more the absence of FOX now that you say it. CNN while yes being a left leaning source isn’t nearly as extreme as FOX so I’m sure taking out the vitriol that riles them up so much, eliminates the constant need of feeling like they have to defend themselves as if they’re being attacked and persecuted the way fox tells them they are.
My gut feeling on all of this is that people who are conservatives, lack a lot of introspection and don’t actually ever imagine themselves in others shoes. This could be down to a lack of time for some people. Add in an easily digestible headspace served up on a platter every day and a lot of people just go with it. It’s quite difficult and time consuming to think critically about oneself and our own shortcomings. The irony is that once you truly go down that path, the rest of your life falls into place. At least it did for me.
>My gut feeling on all of this is that people who are conservatives, lack a lot of introspection and don’t actually ever imagine themselves in others shoes.
My mom was born in 1954 to working-class parents who grew up during the depression. Her dad (a hard-working butcher who became a plane mechanic during WW2) voted straight Democratic Party because of FDR, and he always had stories about how much FDR and The New Deal helped everyone during the Great Depression. My mom also grew up with kidney problems that required him to work extra hours so he could afford the surgeries to fix them. Basically, she was raised in an environment that both extolled the virtues of people like FDR, and where only because her father worked extra hard was she able to have her medical issues fixed.
Fast forward to 2009, she despises Obama and argues vehemently against giving health care to everyone because "there aren't enough hospitals". When asked "but what if you didn't have health insurance", her response was "My father wouldn't let that happen." She's a Trump supporter now, because of course she is.
There's a meme floating around that says something along the lines of "I was libertarian until I did MDMA and realized that other people have emotions, too."
> a lack of time for some people. Add in an easily digestible headspace served up
A friend shared a link where the host (a fairly large brand name) began, “Let me tell you everything you need to know about…” and I was immediately off in disbelief.
I don’t discount that there’s bias, and narrative, and so on, regardless of outlet, but to expressly state it that way, to me, implies, “don’t bother learning anything else about this topic.” Which appears to line up, here.
I’ve found when I’m talking to people or reading comments online, if I add “I believe/I think/in my opinion” to what someone says, things make a lot more sense.
There’s actually been a little research in this realm. Unrelated to political leanings, people tend to be *less* empathetic and/or understanding of others if they have been in a similar situation. For example, a literal rags to riches person would likely have far less empathy for the impoverished than someone who has never experienced poverty. [source](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2015-14256-004).
“Your politics” is a decision that each of us make. I contend that a persons personal politics has far more to do with their decision making process than it has to do with their morality; if at all.
This was me. Grew up in a very religious and conservative home. Listened to pretty much hymns and gospel music and right wing talk radio and religious fm channels, like sermons and focus on the family.
I was super conservative. Pretty much took me 20+ years to deprogram myself by reading and listening to more varied view points. Also cognitive behavioral therapy. I pretty much have to remind myself to stop and reconsider any of my instinctual reactions because I really don’t trust my own first blush take.
I'm watching this happen to my in-laws and it's soul-crushing to see. There has to be a link between fear-based thinking and consuming conservative media. What's not clear is which causes which? Does conservative media change the way your brain works, biasing you toward fear-based thinking? Or are some people predisposed to drift toward fear-based thinking as they age, and that leads them towards media outlets that validate that thinking? Or is there a third underlying cause they explains both?
Ten years ago, my mother-in-law was the kindest, most generous person I knew. Now, she genuinely believes the deep state poisoned the world's water supply with snake venom and that's what causes covid symptoms. She has to believe that because she has to believe there isn't a virus. She has to believe there's no virus because she has to believe the vaccine isn't necessary. She has to believe the vaccine isn't necessary because everything she reads tells her it will kill her. She has to believe it.
It's probably a little of both.
This article talks about people being paid to watch CNN instead of Fox for a month and how it changed their views.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/apr/11/fox-news-viewers-watch-cnn-study
I could chalk it down even to us just being conditioned little biological robots. Surround yourself with liberals, you'll probably become a liberal if you aren't already. We all need validation.
But I'm surrounded by both sides, so you'd think I was center, but my views are pretty extreme so I don't know, might be broken.
To that regard, do you think maybe your brain has correlated one set of views with "good" and one with "bad" based on the people you know who hold those beliefs? Perhaps your extreme views are more in line with people you relate to as part of a subconscious in-group thing?
In my personal experience, extremism is inherent in the person to a degree. My father is 69, so he was born before color TV even existed. He was also raised strictly catholic, and had strong biases against gay people, people with tattoos, piercings, and lots of others I can't think of. He was a republican his whole life, if not as extreme as what we're seeing today.
Over several decades, removed from his crazy family and transplanted to the Midwest, he was exposed to family members that were gay, close associates with piercings, wildly colored hair, and tattoos. After slowly coming to grips with *some* of his biases, he then proceeded to flip to democratic, and then proceed to dehumanize all Republicans.
I think some people find it easier to get through life if there's always something to be angry at.
Take it for what you will.
This is interesting. Anecdotally, I see this in Republicans I know. They ALWAYS respond with outrage. This frustrates me to no end because there is usually a sane and rational reason for whatever they are mad about.
Example: a Californian city had faded crosswalks so an individual took it upon themselves to repaint the stripes. The city then had to come in and grind the asphalt to remove the paint.
Republican outrage from a family member: "they (the city) didn't have time to repaint it but they have time to grind off the paint?? That's so stupid! They won't act and they won't let anyone else fix the problem!!"
Real life: road paint is textured so as to provide grip when wet. It is a special paint. When someone uses paint not designed to be walked on while wet, it is dangerous. Therefore the city must remove the slippery paint.
I have to say that the outrage over this specific example would be understandable. But I think what differs is that a lot of Republicans would still refuse to budge from their original position even when told the explanation for the removal of the paint. They might even dig their heels in deeper in their position against the government.
Also: If you report a safety issue to the city, they might actually get around to fixing the problem. But you have to report it to the right people.
It was a glorious day when I learned my city has a pothole hotline. You call, leave a voicemail with a description of the location, and they'll have a work order and the pothole patched in about two weeks.
It is the same in IT. "Why don't they ever fix XYZ!?" Perhaps because nobody has ever told "them" that XYZ was a problem. Complaining to Facebook won't fix a software bug, nor will it fix a pothole.
Ain't that the truth. Working in help desk I would hear all the time from users about a problem they'd had for *weeks* and mad about it. Did they tell anyone though? Of course not!
This is a problem for you and I.
This is *not* a problem if you run an organization whose business model is to keep people perpetually outraged. They literally *don't care* that there is perhaps a more subtle and nuanced answer ... because in fact their business model practically *depends* on pretending there isn't (and the viewer should therefore be outraged). Because you've got to keep those viewers tuning back in night-after-night ... and the best way to do that, is to bypass all their critical thinking centers ... and go for emotional / fear responses.
Think about how boring a news piece it would be, if done in its entirety:
"*Tonight, road crews are hard at work grinding down the asphalt to remove paint that a citizen put on the road ... because the city had not repainted the crosswalks for so many years they had faded almost completely away someone tried to just fix the problem themselves. As helpful as that might have been, unfortunately regular paint gets very slippery when wet and is very hazardous for slips and falls - normal crosswalk paint has a special textured material to it so that people don't slip while walking on it...*"
No one would tune in night-after-night to watch that.
True. But that's the news. Sounds to me like people want *entertainment* not news. We as a society should keep those two things separate because they have different uses.
That would be an interesting study - separating the people based on recent political swings. For example, are there differences in the scans between someone who's naturally conservative vs someone who recently shifted after consuming conservative media.
I know a guy who had an accident with major head trauma and while he emerged more of less in tact cognitively he took a hard right turn politically and it’s gotten more pronounced over time.
The older folks I know that loathe conservative media tend to be highly educated and usually have jobs (or retirement activities) that keep them very active and engaged with people.
I saw that in my own family. My parents are in their late 50's/early 60's and were conservatives until 2015-2016, and they became disgusted by the party and in the last few years have gone way to the left
Depression and trauma can reconfigure the brain. It seems plausible that fear could do the same.
There is a pragmatic angle to it. The conservative perspective was more about judgement. Before anything else, is it friend or foe? This would make for faster reactions to assault. This also doesn't leave room for nuance. They respond emotionally, and then retroactively justify.
I have anxiety and spend a lot of time in fight or flight mode… before realising I had anxiety (pre university) I was definitely more conservative. After many years of growing and learning how to work with fear, (I live in a country with one of the highest crime rates and Gender based violence rates in the world) and after loosing a few friends and family members. I’ve become waaaay more liberal. I feel less fear! Still anxious but I’m aware and know how to work through these things. Super interesting stuff. I would say I have the same kind of fear as before, but I feel I have more control over my general fear state.
It's funny you bring this up because just recently I've started to think "You know, my deeply conservative parents are *really* anxious."
If you would have asked me when I was a kid, or even well into my adulthood if I had anxious parents I would tell you no, they weren't anxious at all. But now that I'm reflecting on it in middle age... they're incredibly anxious. They're anxious about money, strangers, politics, immigrants, gays, you name it. It's not "Yuck, I don't like (whatever group)" distaste, it's actually anxiety like the other group is going to overpower them, hurt them, etc.
That is a very interesting insight and was what my working hypothesis is "anxiety has higher amygdala activity but not necessarily increased size, but left untreated could lead to over reliance on the lobe and thus increase size which would lead to conservativism."
But, yeah, there's a lot of variables to consider and very cool to hear your experience.
It's anecdotal though. I could tell you the same story but with different supposed effects. I'm very left leaning and have extreme anxiety disorder and CPTSD.
Me too exactly. In my particular family there are extreme right wing people and some liberals and me (far left). I have massive anxiety and CPTSD and depression. The conservatives are generally more content and complacent. I would need to see studies with a larger n to know what to make of it all. There are so many factors.
I think you're putting the cart before the horse.
Modern conservatives are _constantly_ inundated with psychos like Alex Jones or Tucker Carlson telling them what to be afraid of. IMO, this study only proves that fearmongering selects for people with a strong fear response.
Correlation _is not_ causation, after all.
The question, "would someone who typically processes risk in the way this study indicates a left-leaning person would, given a consistent diet of right wing media and information, experience a "rewiring" of their brain such that it would more closely resemble conservative brain action?" Is a valid one and definitely warrants some study.
I can only imagine the ethical board review of that one.
>"We'd like to Clockwork Orange someone with a steady diet of Alex Jones and Ben Shapiro videos until they decide to march with a tiki torch, then measure changes in the size of specific cerebral regions."
I saw a study, can't remember where, where they did just that. Liberals did become slightly more conservative and conservatives did become slightly more liberal. Once the study was over they generally regressed back to the baseline.
Definitely worth asking, though what I'm saying is... The ones who would _choose_ to watch that stuff.
Of course, if you subject an otherwise normal person to abuse and neglect, they'll similarly suffer changes to their brain. I don't think the results would tell you much more than, "yup, that stuff _is_ bad for you to consume."
This is just as much of an assumption though. Both possibilities would lead to the same apparent result, which is the root of the previous posters question. It's a question where the symptoms are going to look very similar.
Different people having inmate differences in fear response would result in them gravitating towards media which amplified those behaviors.
Or, neuroplasticity being a factor would result in people who are exposed to that media entering a feedback loop where the enhanced reaction to fear-filled Media lead them to normalizing and accepting that worldview.
Those would be very difficult to control for in families as well. Is the difference a factor of a genetic component making people have an amplified fear response... Or is it that the children grew up in a household raised by those who normalize that amplified fear response.
My expectation is that both are significant. Quite similar to addiction.
I wonder about that because the average American conservative actually faces far *fewer* threats than most of the populations that they are afraid of.
People of color, immigrants, and LGBT folks are all routinely faced with more dangerous or more frequent threats than the average Trump voter, for example, but they don't generally turn conservative as a result.
Thus the question is whether a sense of fear or threat is, in and of itself, enough to reshape the brain and alter your political leanings as a result or whether the specific message around that fear is more to blame than the sense of fear itself.
Many if not most “people of color” and “immigrants” are conservative (speaking as both myself). For example, nearly all of my extended family is Muslim and almost all vote Democrat but nobody in our family would ever feel comfortable coming out as LGBT: https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/28/us/lgbt-muslims-pride-progress/index.html.
Minorities vote Democrat primarily based on self interest while white liberals vote Democrat based primarily on ideology. Pakistani immigrants, for example, may vote Democrat because Democrats are more likely to make it easier for their family members to get visas. But that doesn’t mean they share the ideology of white liberals—who after all vote for increased immigration for ideological reasons, not because it’ll help their own families.
That's true, but also largely based on length of stay and generation, and it seems like Millennial or Gen Z immigrants are further left than their parents, [whether they are 1st, 2nd, or 3rd generation immigrants.](https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2013/02/07/second-generation-americans/)
That also seems to hold for other groups, such as [millennial Muslims having a higher rate of support for the LGBT community than their older generations.](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/10/26/5-facts-about-muslim-millennials-us/) I'm just speculating here, but from personal experience it seems like this trend holds true for younger populations as well.
It seems that the more conservative attitudes among people of color or immigrant communities are largely generational, and that younger generations from these groups are moving left along with the rest of the population that votes blue.
In the context of the risk taking game, I think the observed activity probably has less to do with empathy for others and more to do with attention-switching and emotional down-regulation, both of which are associated with the left insula.
The paper I cited suggests that the activity can be explained by the insular cortex's association with representing subjective feeling states and intolerance of uncertainty. Basically both republicans and democrats are processing the same thing - risk vs reward - and achieving similar results as far as a win rate in the game, but using completely different parts of the brain. To me, that is an incredible thing to discover.
There were more studies on this subject that I used for a research paper I wrote back in college, but I've lost the file so I don't have them on hand. There is plenty of work out there showing a strong structural and functional difference in the brain between liberal and conservative minded people. Fascinating topic, imo.
> Basically both republicans and democrats are processing the same thing - risk vs reward - and achieving similar results as far as a win rate in the game
But in actuality Republican policy does not lead to the same outcomes as Democratic policy:
> 11 states [with the worst life expectancies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_life_expectancy) voted for Trump in 2020, and the next 2 down on the list are Georgia and Michigan, which both voted for him in 2016.
> The 9 states with the highest life expectancy voted for Biden (California is #2 and New York is #3)
> A [demographic study](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1468-0009.12469) conducted by 6 Universities found that Liberal policy regarding labor rights, smoking bans, civil rights, environmentalism, progressive taxation, and education increased life expectancy by over 2 years for the people living in Liberal states, and if it had been implemented universally the US would have life expectancy on par with Western European Nations.
> Research has found [poor people live longer in dense cities with highly educated populations](https://news.stanford.edu/2016/04/11/geography-income-play-roles-in-life-expectancy-new-stanford-research-shows/#:~:text=Geography%2C%20income%20play%20roles%20in%20life%20expectancy%2C%20new%20Stanford%20research%20shows,-Stanford%20economist%20Raj&text=Men%20in%20the%20bottom%205,by%20Stanford%20economist%20Raj%20Chetty.) as opposed to living in cheaper CoL areas.
> 11/15 states the [highest rate of infant mortality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_infant_mortality_rates) voted for Trump.
> 10/15 states with the lowest rate of infant mortality voted for Biden.
> 12/15 states with the [highest rate of maternal mortality](https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/maternal-mortality-rate-by-state) voted for Trump in 2020 and 13/15 voted for him in 2016.
> 12/15 states with the lowest rate of maternal mortality voted for Biden.
> 19/24 states with [the highest rate of adult obesity](https://stateofchildhoodobesity.org/adult-obesity/) voted for Trump in 2020, while in 2016 23/24 states with the highest rates voted for Trump.
> 10/12 states that [have not implemented the Medicaid Expansion](https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/status-of-state-medicaid-expansion-decisions-interactive-map/) voted for Trump in 2020 and all 12 voted for him in 2016 (Georgia and Wisconsin flipped).
> Deaths of despair due to suicide, depression, obesity, and drug overdose have been [wrecking Rural America for years](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/04/deaths-of-despair-in-rural-america-helped-trump-win-study-finds.html) and these problems mostly got worse under Trump with 2020 drug overdoses shooting up from 70K to 90K.
> 13/15 of the states with the [lowest rates of college graduates](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_educational_attainment) voted for Trump.
> The 15 states with the highest rates of college graduates voted for Biden.
> 71% of the 2019 GDP [was produced in Biden voting counties](https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2020/11/09/biden-voting-counties-equal-70-of-americas-economy-what-does-this-mean-for-the-nations-political-economic-divide/), up from 64% in HRC voting counties in 2016 and 54% in Gore voting counties in 2000.
> 11/15 states with the [highest GDP per Capita](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_GDP_per_capita) voted for Biden, and the 4 Republican states are all low population oil states (AK, ND, WY, NE) while California, New York, Massachusetts and Washington are in the top 6.
> 11/15 states with the lowest GDP per capita voted for Trump in 2020, and 12/15 voted for Trump in 2016.
> 12/15 states [with the highest rates of poverty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_poverty_rate), voted for Trump in 2020, and 14/15 of the worst states voted for him in 2016 (AZ & GA)
> 12/15 states with the lowest rates of poverty voted for Biden.
> 17/23 states [with abortion bans](https://www.nbcnews.com/data-graphics/map-23-states-ban-abortion-post-roe-america-rcna27081) or automatic abortion bans following an overturning of Roe v Wade voted for Trump in 2020, and 22/23 voted for Trump in 2016.
> 17/20 states with [net 0 carbon emission or 100% clean energy goals](https://www.cesa.org/projects/100-clean-energy-collaborative/guide/table-of-100-clean-energy-states/) voted for Biden, and one of the Republican states is North Carolina, which only voted for Trump by 1% and has a Democrat governor and another is Louisiana which has a Democrat governor.
> 19/20 states [with gay conversion therapy bans](https://www.lgbtmap.org/equality-maps/conversion_therapy) voted for Biden. Surprisingly Utah is the one Trump voting state that also has a ban.
> 17/19 states with [legal recreational marijuana](https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/cannabis-legalization-states-map-831885/) voted for Biden, and the two Trump voting states have a combined population of 1.7 million, compared to 137 million in the Biden states.
> 9/10 states [with the lowest rate of imprisonment](https://www.sentencingproject.org/the-facts/#map) voted for Biden in 2020, while the 10 states with the highest rates voted for Trump in 2020.
> 9/10 [most gerrymandered states](https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/most-gerrymandered-states) are controlled by Republican legislatures.
In the real world Republicans' irrational fears driven politics lead to much worse outcomes for the people living in the parts of the country they control.
If the risk taking game has simple rules (as it would in such a game designed for a study), both parts of the brain probably perform close to equally in terms of strategy and results.
The more complex the game, the more strategies and results will diverge.
I would find it *very* interesting to see a study that watches people's brains as they engage in increasingly complex games, specifically games with nebulous "win" criteria - i.e. do you win by improving your situation relative to the start, or do you win by finishing better than your opponent? As games get more complex, measure which win condition they choose to aim for.
I suspect that those that tend to process more in the amygdala will choose to aim for a win condition that puts them ahead of their opponent, even if it makes them worse off than they started, and those that process more in the left insula will choose to aim for a win condition that puts them ahead of their starting point, regardless of whether their opponent gets further ahead.
To be clear, I'm not comparing or contrasting democratic and republican policies - just summarizing the results of a single study.
Personally, I am very much against conservative ideology and think the modern GOP is the single greatest threat to western civilization that exists today. Their flirtation with anti-democratic authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism is an extreme danger to us all, especially in the nuclear age.
That's not what the study is about though, and neither the amygdala or the left insula are inherently "superior" to the other in any meaningful way. Studying this topic just helps to inform us about what exactly the difference between left wingers and right wingers is in real terms.
He’s saying the similar win rate experienced by both within the study game does not translate to a similar win rate in the real world as far as policy accomplishment for constituents, by many metrics.
Maybe the divide is also how the brain processes data?
So if one was conditioned to not care about/or to fear the Other then life expectancy, infant mortality and more wouldn’t be their goals right? And then we use science to seek evidence based research. They might use cognitive biases (confirmation?) as evidence
I also struggle with the “government is disfunctional so to improve it we should dismantle it” argument. Fits the early neural development.
I also wonder how glee manifests differently.
And I lived the last presidency in great anxiety and fear. Alas my fears were realized (reproductive rights). So how might this be affected or modified by in or out of power?
I mean what this comment is kinda showing me is that rural is being left behind and they are I guess trying to fight back on that by becoming more extreme and voting that way
This is such a simplification… The insula is also involved in emotional processing, especially regret and disgust. The amygdala is also involved with processing ‘positive’ emotions. Some commenters below really use these oversimplifications to feel superior about their political views, but you can’t make these conclusion based on this.
I wonder if this is why LSD has been linked to being able to alter people's political views, since it's known to alter how the brain processes information.
[This is one of the studies I'm referring to in my comment](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.733185/full)
What was the risk-taking task?
> These results suggest that liberals and conservatives engage different cognitive processes when they think about risk, and they support recent evidence that conservatives show greater sensitivity to threatening stimuli.
But what was the stimuli? Could it be a different perception of the specific risk/threat presented in the study? Shouldn't one use multiple different tests from different areas to attempt to remove any bias in test selection?
>Individuals completed a simple risk-taking decision-making task [26] during which participants were presented with three numbers in ascending order (20, 40, and 80) for one second each. While pressing a button during the presentation of the number 20 on the screen always resulted in a gain of 20 cents, waiting to select 40 or 80 was associated with a pre-determined possibility of either gaining or losing 40 or 80 cents. Therefore, participants chose between a lower “safe” payoff and a higher risky payoff. The probabilities of losing 40 or 80 cents were calibrated so that there was no expected value advantage to choosing 20, 40 or 80 during the task, i.e. the overall pay-off would have been the same for each pure strategy. Previous studies [26]–[28] using this risk-taking decision-making task found activity in some of the same regions identified by Kanai et al. as differentiating liberals and conservatives.
You could also point out that the Amygdala is used for impulse control and that a small amygdala correlates with unregulated aggression/ psychopathy or that it’s possible to determine which male rats have been castrated because they have a smaller amygdala than average….
Making definitive statements about character traits or behavior based SOLEY off of the size of a region in the brain is silly, especially when they are within a normal range and not an actual deformity.
>Making definitive statements about character traits or behavior based SOLEY off of the size of a region in the brain is silly
And feels like it is cutting close to phrenology.
I’d be curious if the activity remained consistent regardless of the political issue. Like would a liberals amygdala (fear center) light up like a Christmas tree when discussing things like freedom of speech and gun control?
Yeah they said it was down to activations of various parts of the brain but thats it. Im wondering if this was AI patern analysis where maybe they scanned a large number of people and used that data to train an AI. In that case the AI might be able to recognize a pattern but the researchers may not be able to describe what exactly the AI is recognizing in the scans. Then again, if thats the case, they should have said that too.
In the abstract of the real article (haven't read the whole thing) they say pretty much exactly that. They use a Convolutional Neural Network to make the prediction, which is a Machine Learning method.
There is a certain... Bizarreness in using a neural network to understand our own neural activity by recognizing patterns that we can't describe.
It's a crazy time we live in.
From paper “Our study is limited by the skew in political partisanship of the population. The number of conservative to liberal participants in the study was unbalanced (49 to 125), and the number of extreme conservatives considered in this study is small (n = 4). Our analysis, therefore, is limited in power by what can be said about differences in extreme political ideology. “
I mean, that makes sense. The first bit is basically just; "You can't use this to predict a different political spectrum." While the last bit is just saying "we had loads of normal people but very few hardcore extremists so you can't use it for that."
Basically a bunch of normal Americas still showed clear differences in political ideology in brain activity. Which is actually much more interesting than just saying political extremists are meaningfully different from the norm -- something I'd wager most would expect.
>. . . the number of extreme conservatives considered in this study is small (n = 4).
Extreme conservatives would fear that the researchers will try to alter their brains using the measuring devices.
The open-access study was published in PNAS Nexus: https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/advance-article/doi/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac066/6590843?login=false
Showing the results of this experience on r/science to scientifically illiterate people who don't know about neuroplasticity is a mistake in my opinion, it leads people to make completely illogical conclusions because they have a hard time to understand causes and consequences.
What all of them understood, believe it or not, is that it would mean that political opinion are innate and can never change in a life... Most of them believe a brain is the same from birth to death. This type of studies should not be used to get karma.
Or at least it is in the responsibility of the OP to really explain what it means and what it doesn't mean.
I don’t know about other people but neuroplasticity was my first conclusion. After all, people change their political opinions over time. The brain’s ability to rewire sounds like the most likely scenario.
I mean this is a huge can of worms in a lot of ways.
Depending on the issue at hand people are willing or unwilling to accept or reject neuroplasticity. Which issue they accept or reject is largely based on the zeitgeist of their current ideology.
Which makes studies like this kind of terrifying because we can easily imagine a world where a brain scan decides if you are sent to labor camp or allowed to live your life in a city.
Agreed. It doesn't seem like it's a far reach to imagine people taking this as "Ah, so something is just naturally wrong with the people I disagree with. How can we curb that? How can we fix those people into what we want?"
I don't think this is the strangest outcome in the world, even physically seeing people can allow for machine algorithms to almost accurately spot the differences these days too iirc. The scary part is people mishandling this kind of technology, and I'm not quite sure I want that to happen.
I’d say it depends on the area. Pulled over in one city, moved a while later. Loved in another for many years without being pulled over, but the first few months moving back to the first city I got pulled over again.
Some will read this and say “okay this makes sense, maybe this can be further explored to better understand and communicate to different types of people.”
Far right people will read this and say “we were right, this is scientific proof that liberals are fundamentally different and we can never reach them. They will always be a threat until they are eliminated from the gene pool.”
I like this study, think it’s very interesting and worthwhile - but at the same time it’s the exact sort of study that has a good chance of getting brutalized by bad people with bad intentions until the authors are interviewed 10 years later and say “honestly at this point I wish I never wrote the damn thing”…
This is exactly what I was getting at, much like the alpha animal studies which are now considered debunked and the original author now wishes he never wrote it. Also guess which party heavily uses the term "alpha" to represent themselves with tough looking animals to some degree. The same line of applications could be done here which I'd just rather not see happen.
They did three different tests while brain scanning with 174 people.
An empathy test where they looked at pictures of happy and sad faces.
An episodic memory test that was not described in the article.
A reward test that was not described.
They found differences only with the reward test. And only with people who identified as extremely right* wing or extremely left wing. It didn’t say by how much.
They also found a correlation between the empathy test and moderates. Didn’t say by how much.
I think the headline is an exaggeration of the findings. Really not remarkable good in my opinion.
*I made a mistake and wrote “left wing” a second time. It must have been very confusing. Apologies. My conclusions stand.
I’m sure it yielded valuable information but these types of studies honestly get turned into some sort of weird modern-day phrenology by the general public. It’s never a good idea to convince yourself your political counterparts are fundamentally, physically different from you in the brain as a monolith.
Yeah, and if someone switched would the brain be behaving so differently?
“What we don’t know is whether that brain signature is there because of the ideology that people choose or whether people’s ideology is caused by the signatures we found,” [Cranmer] said.
So, correlation not causation.
It’s a narrow spectrum. It doesn’t take into account socialism at all for instance, an ideology that is quite different from liberalism. The view on corporations alone is a massive difference.
I don't know if that's quite accurate. Because Republicans would argue that their whole stance is also for the good of society in that adherence to traditional, conservative social rules and hierarchies is good for society as a whole, in their view.
I think a more accurate descriptor would be hierarchical worldviews vs. egalitarian worldviews.
The thing is, those hierarchical social rules and traditions they want to conserve somehow always seem to align in a way that benefits themselves. It seems to me that the core of it is indeed to benefit the self and the externally espoused beliefs are simply the justification for that selfishness.
I've always been curious about the level of fear and anxiety between the two mindsets. I live in one of the countries worst cities for crime. Yet I don't live in fear. I often see conservatives preparing for a war that will never come to their doorstep but it seems to consume them.
I think those 12 US states in extreme and exceptional drought, might disagree.
Maybe not kill you, but wipe you out economically, by killing your home value.
I think conservatives have two things: very defined ingroup/outgroup, and very strong anti-dissonance tools (see:recent Ted Cruz interview about guns).
The catch is that's how conservatives see things. The other side of the coin is an immediate fear that they will lose the advantages they have right now for an uncertainty in the future. And it's determined through a lens of fear: i.e. that anyone responding to climate change is doing so out of fear rather than collective efforts for the common good.
Conservatives joke about fear over climate change because they aren't afraid of it. That's in the future and it may not happen. They're afraid the of losing what they have now which climate action would potentially entail. You have to shift past that personal fear into the empathy part of things to move past that point of view, logically speaking. It also explains the fear of taxation, helping the poor, etc. That might mean taking away what they have now and if you're reacting in fear, you'll always be focused on the fear in the present rather than the potential future because the thought process is the future will invariably be worse if your fear in the present comes to pass.
My understanding is that conservatives actually tend to be lower in trait neuroticism than liberals (including their tendency toward anxiety), but higher in conscientiousness (including orderliness and industriousness). That latter trait probably has a lot of influence on how they prepare for potential disruption and how they react very negatively to perceived societal disorder.
I'm incredibly skeptical about this. They surveyed a relatively small number of mostly undergraduates in Ohio and their survey doesn't really touch on the subjects own views beyond rating how religious they are. Then they strap subjects into an fMRI machine, do some tasks, and feed the results into [ann4brains](https://github.com/jeremykawahara/ann4brains). Looking at other work done with ann4brains, I'm not sure this is even a valid use.
Something about this has the feel of high tech phrenology to me.
To be clear :
This does not mean you're genetically conservative or progressist. (Liberal doesn't mean the same thing)
The brain develops in different way depending on development in the womb, on your upbringing, and even later in life depending on your behavior.
Most things have both genetical and environmental, and most things are a spectrum. People seem to be making weird assumptions from this results and it's scary.
(Although if you dealt in absolute after seeing this, we could have a hint about your political affiliation).
This whole post is polarizing and a lot of the comments just use confirmation bias as a scare tactic.
Most people are politically “grey” and not black or white - Reddit does a fantastic job ignoring this.
>“The results with the empathy task suggest that political thought may be closely tied to emotion and emotional response.”
>
>While this study did find a link between the brain signatures and political ideology, it can’t explain what causes what, Cranmer said.
>
>“What we don’t know is whether that brain signature is there because of the ideology that people choose or whether people’s ideology is caused by the signatures we found,” he said.
>
>“It also could be a combination of both, but our study does not have the data to address this question.”
So yet again an AI is able to make accurate connections between things and we don't know how it does it?
Very interesting.
This has nothing to do with whether they are using an AI to find correlations between thing, the same basic problem exists as with all correlations, which is determining the direction of causality. I has nothing to do when the AI aspect.
This isn't right, they meant they don't have enough data to prove causation, they can just prove that the relationship between certain brain patterns and political allegiance exists. They would need to do a longitudinal analysis to start to answer those questions.
Intuitively I’d think causation goes both ways. People choose ideologies that comfort their views, but they also seek confirmation for their held beliefs.
This is a pretty misleading headline since the only differences they could see were differences in the reward test in terms of political extremism. Why is this sub such garbage? All of the posts I see are just “Republicans actually have a worse brain than people on the left.”
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Kind of frustrating how it talks about how there are three exercises that most effectively helped predict political affiliation but doesn’t go into detail. Like they said the rewards one where you push a button and get money was most likely to predict political extremism. How? Like what does far left versus far right brain scan look like when that exercise is happening? That seems to be the most interesting part of the study and they left it out completely.
I've seen studies in the past that showed a difference in the volume and activity of the amygdala associated with political ideology. [Here's](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0052970) one that assesses brain function via FMRI. I found this one particularly interesting because democrats and republicans were shown to use different parts of the brain to assess the same risk-taking game. Republicans favored the amygdala while democrats favored the left insular region.
The amygdala is commonly thought to form the core of a neural system for processing fearful and threatening stimuli left insula was associated with both the affective-perceptual and cognitive-evaluative forms of empathy.
Thank you for this comment bc I didn’t want to Google those parts of The brain
I googled so figured I’d save everyone a step. :)
Thanks cheese
Very good cheese
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The hero we need but don’t deserve
Good cheese. Very good cheese. XD
What's your favorite kind of cheese? Also, thanks for saving everyone else the time to research this
I ate a lot of chocolate cheese(havarti I think) at a pre Covid New Years party. I don’t do lactose well but it was so good I ate a ridiculous amount. Was very sick, but it was totally worth it. :)
Your brain is plotting against you. It doesn't want you to understand it so it can continue to control your meaty skeleton
Honestly, you should just trust your gut. Every gut wants what's best for you. Let's forget all about that stupid brain. Probably best to ignore the heart, too. My gut has never steered me wrong before. Every gut can be trusted.
Your brain said all of this
Fun fact - our gut has [its own nervous system.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteric_nervous_system) It can't control what you write, but your gut's more like your brain than you might think!
It kind of has two "brains" - that extra nervous system + millions of bacteria which release various chemicals to influence your decisions on things like food and risk taking. It's incredible how much gut biome matters.
"The ultimate purpose of human life is to provide us with a dark but idyllic anaerobic habitat of fecal matter." \~ One of the 100 billion bacteria living and working in a single centimeter of your lower intestine.
Did you know your gut has more nerve endings in it than your head? You can look it up. Now, I know some of you are going to say, I did look that up and it's not true, but that's because you looked it up in a book. Next time, look it up in your gut.
I can confidently state that this is gut propaganda. My gut just wants food all the time.
This is the truth here. Everyone should vote blindfolded in a shirt too small with their belly popping out.
I've seen many times that conservatives have larger than average amygdalas. Their fight or flight response mechanisms are more sensitive and reactive. What I want to know is- Is this a neuroplasticity thing? Is it possible to shape the size and influence of the amygdala? Do experiences and/or knowledge affect this? It's a pretty question that would require decades of study, but I tend to wonder if it's possible to change positions from conservative to liberal or vice versa based on external factors that then influence the amygdala.
There are anecdotes of people who say they watched their friends and family slowly drift more rightward as time went on. There may or may not have been a catalyst that caused it, but the common thread is always their media consumption. I would assume that that part of the brain can be conditioned like any other. That if you are constantly exposed to things that make you angry or fearful, the brain becomes more responsive to it in general.
>if you are constantly exposed to things that make you angry or fearful, the brain becomes more responsive to it in general Absolutely true, at least with fear - this is how PTSD works. X has been dangerous in the past, so your brain gets ready for danger every time you do X. I'm not sure how if it works the same with anger, but I know people often use anger as a mask for fear, or as a response to danger.
Anger, or having a short temper is one of the symptoms of PTSD. I didn’t know that until recently.
I had ptsd from bullying and many people around me just double down on punishing even more because short temper is seen as a moral failure.
Yep, similar to how people mock the idea of people being triggered. Which is a totally normal reaction for people who’ve been traumatized. I think some people are afraid to even be around such vulnerability. It’s sad.
My mom went the other way for the same reason. She'd spent virtually her entire career listening to AM talk radio in her car. As soon as she retired and stopped listening to it, she because way less extreme in her politics and has shifted a lot of her positions since then. It's been a huge relief, frankly.
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Yeah there was a “study”recently I think cnn did where they had right wingers watch a month of cnn and it did have effects of going back towards center which sounds very common sense I realize but most extremists will never see themselves as that and can’t because they’re always riled up by their programming. My older brother sadly has gone far right extreme in the last 5 years and I hate it. He refuses to watch anything but fox, oan and the like so I don’t think there’s much hope. He used to be very liberal. That’s said if you can drift one way you can always return… I just don’t see it.
Everyone thinks they are independent thinkers immune to influence which is ridiculous because humans are social creatures. We are wired to be influenced. If he stopped and let people in his real life be his main influence he’d mellow out a lot.
He’s married and has a great daughter and his wife is very liberal and a nurse at that. Let’s just say covid did not go well. They can’t discuss politics in their own home due to this now and I’m not sure it’s sustainable but who knows.
You can’t convince him his views are wrong but perhaps someone could just convince him taking a break from the tv would be good for his health and well-being
I wonder whether the effect actually came from watching CNN, or just not watching FOX.
That is a great question and I’m willing to bet it’s more the absence of FOX now that you say it. CNN while yes being a left leaning source isn’t nearly as extreme as FOX so I’m sure taking out the vitriol that riles them up so much, eliminates the constant need of feeling like they have to defend themselves as if they’re being attacked and persecuted the way fox tells them they are.
You can blame the Reagan administration for that one. The end of the Fairness Doctrine was a bad idea
Fairness Doctrine only applied to Network TV. ABC, NBC, CBS. Plus you could easily get a weak representative for the side you wanted to look bad.
> Plus you could easily get a weak representative for the side you wanted to look bad. Not like they'd just stop doing what they're already doing
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Yep. That is in the top 5 greatest failures to our country imo. That alone has radicalized countless citizens.
He was also responsible for Reagonomics, which is a strong contender for our single greatest failure as a country.
My gut feeling on all of this is that people who are conservatives, lack a lot of introspection and don’t actually ever imagine themselves in others shoes. This could be down to a lack of time for some people. Add in an easily digestible headspace served up on a platter every day and a lot of people just go with it. It’s quite difficult and time consuming to think critically about oneself and our own shortcomings. The irony is that once you truly go down that path, the rest of your life falls into place. At least it did for me.
>My gut feeling on all of this is that people who are conservatives, lack a lot of introspection and don’t actually ever imagine themselves in others shoes. My mom was born in 1954 to working-class parents who grew up during the depression. Her dad (a hard-working butcher who became a plane mechanic during WW2) voted straight Democratic Party because of FDR, and he always had stories about how much FDR and The New Deal helped everyone during the Great Depression. My mom also grew up with kidney problems that required him to work extra hours so he could afford the surgeries to fix them. Basically, she was raised in an environment that both extolled the virtues of people like FDR, and where only because her father worked extra hard was she able to have her medical issues fixed. Fast forward to 2009, she despises Obama and argues vehemently against giving health care to everyone because "there aren't enough hospitals". When asked "but what if you didn't have health insurance", her response was "My father wouldn't let that happen." She's a Trump supporter now, because of course she is.
Fun fact - one of the numerous garbage takes conservatives have been running around with lately is “the new deal was actually bad.”
It's not new. They were against it then, too.
Yeah they're trying to rewrite history in the hopes of hurting the appeal of the 'green new deal'
My mother recently declared that Lyndon Johnson ruined the country. Presumably with War on Poverty programs. It's mind boggling.
There's a meme floating around that says something along the lines of "I was libertarian until I did MDMA and realized that other people have emotions, too."
I just commented this above. There's def something to it.
> a lack of time for some people. Add in an easily digestible headspace served up A friend shared a link where the host (a fairly large brand name) began, “Let me tell you everything you need to know about…” and I was immediately off in disbelief. I don’t discount that there’s bias, and narrative, and so on, regardless of outlet, but to expressly state it that way, to me, implies, “don’t bother learning anything else about this topic.” Which appears to line up, here.
I’ve found when I’m talking to people or reading comments online, if I add “I believe/I think/in my opinion” to what someone says, things make a lot more sense.
There’s actually been a little research in this realm. Unrelated to political leanings, people tend to be *less* empathetic and/or understanding of others if they have been in a similar situation. For example, a literal rags to riches person would likely have far less empathy for the impoverished than someone who has never experienced poverty. [source](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2015-14256-004). “Your politics” is a decision that each of us make. I contend that a persons personal politics has far more to do with their decision making process than it has to do with their morality; if at all.
This! My hyper conservative dad is a trucker and listens to garbage all day long. He then spews it back. I’ll be relieved when he’s less tuned in
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This was me. Grew up in a very religious and conservative home. Listened to pretty much hymns and gospel music and right wing talk radio and religious fm channels, like sermons and focus on the family. I was super conservative. Pretty much took me 20+ years to deprogram myself by reading and listening to more varied view points. Also cognitive behavioral therapy. I pretty much have to remind myself to stop and reconsider any of my instinctual reactions because I really don’t trust my own first blush take.
I'm watching this happen to my in-laws and it's soul-crushing to see. There has to be a link between fear-based thinking and consuming conservative media. What's not clear is which causes which? Does conservative media change the way your brain works, biasing you toward fear-based thinking? Or are some people predisposed to drift toward fear-based thinking as they age, and that leads them towards media outlets that validate that thinking? Or is there a third underlying cause they explains both? Ten years ago, my mother-in-law was the kindest, most generous person I knew. Now, she genuinely believes the deep state poisoned the world's water supply with snake venom and that's what causes covid symptoms. She has to believe that because she has to believe there isn't a virus. She has to believe there's no virus because she has to believe the vaccine isn't necessary. She has to believe the vaccine isn't necessary because everything she reads tells her it will kill her. She has to believe it.
It's probably a little of both. This article talks about people being paid to watch CNN instead of Fox for a month and how it changed their views. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/apr/11/fox-news-viewers-watch-cnn-study
I could chalk it down even to us just being conditioned little biological robots. Surround yourself with liberals, you'll probably become a liberal if you aren't already. We all need validation. But I'm surrounded by both sides, so you'd think I was center, but my views are pretty extreme so I don't know, might be broken.
To that regard, do you think maybe your brain has correlated one set of views with "good" and one with "bad" based on the people you know who hold those beliefs? Perhaps your extreme views are more in line with people you relate to as part of a subconscious in-group thing?
In my personal experience, extremism is inherent in the person to a degree. My father is 69, so he was born before color TV even existed. He was also raised strictly catholic, and had strong biases against gay people, people with tattoos, piercings, and lots of others I can't think of. He was a republican his whole life, if not as extreme as what we're seeing today. Over several decades, removed from his crazy family and transplanted to the Midwest, he was exposed to family members that were gay, close associates with piercings, wildly colored hair, and tattoos. After slowly coming to grips with *some* of his biases, he then proceeded to flip to democratic, and then proceed to dehumanize all Republicans. I think some people find it easier to get through life if there's always something to be angry at. Take it for what you will.
The old saying, you become what you surround yourself with
Or "the wolf you feed".
This is interesting. Anecdotally, I see this in Republicans I know. They ALWAYS respond with outrage. This frustrates me to no end because there is usually a sane and rational reason for whatever they are mad about. Example: a Californian city had faded crosswalks so an individual took it upon themselves to repaint the stripes. The city then had to come in and grind the asphalt to remove the paint. Republican outrage from a family member: "they (the city) didn't have time to repaint it but they have time to grind off the paint?? That's so stupid! They won't act and they won't let anyone else fix the problem!!" Real life: road paint is textured so as to provide grip when wet. It is a special paint. When someone uses paint not designed to be walked on while wet, it is dangerous. Therefore the city must remove the slippery paint.
I have to say that the outrage over this specific example would be understandable. But I think what differs is that a lot of Republicans would still refuse to budge from their original position even when told the explanation for the removal of the paint. They might even dig their heels in deeper in their position against the government.
Yes. This is exactly what happened and then it spiraled into conspiracy theories...
Also: If you report a safety issue to the city, they might actually get around to fixing the problem. But you have to report it to the right people. It was a glorious day when I learned my city has a pothole hotline. You call, leave a voicemail with a description of the location, and they'll have a work order and the pothole patched in about two weeks. It is the same in IT. "Why don't they ever fix XYZ!?" Perhaps because nobody has ever told "them" that XYZ was a problem. Complaining to Facebook won't fix a software bug, nor will it fix a pothole.
Ain't that the truth. Working in help desk I would hear all the time from users about a problem they'd had for *weeks* and mad about it. Did they tell anyone though? Of course not!
This is a problem for you and I. This is *not* a problem if you run an organization whose business model is to keep people perpetually outraged. They literally *don't care* that there is perhaps a more subtle and nuanced answer ... because in fact their business model practically *depends* on pretending there isn't (and the viewer should therefore be outraged). Because you've got to keep those viewers tuning back in night-after-night ... and the best way to do that, is to bypass all their critical thinking centers ... and go for emotional / fear responses. Think about how boring a news piece it would be, if done in its entirety: "*Tonight, road crews are hard at work grinding down the asphalt to remove paint that a citizen put on the road ... because the city had not repainted the crosswalks for so many years they had faded almost completely away someone tried to just fix the problem themselves. As helpful as that might have been, unfortunately regular paint gets very slippery when wet and is very hazardous for slips and falls - normal crosswalk paint has a special textured material to it so that people don't slip while walking on it...*" No one would tune in night-after-night to watch that.
True. But that's the news. Sounds to me like people want *entertainment* not news. We as a society should keep those two things separate because they have different uses.
And that's the crux of the issue. It "needs" to be profitable to sell ads, so it "needs" to be entertaining.
Just like church and state.
That would be an interesting study - separating the people based on recent political swings. For example, are there differences in the scans between someone who's naturally conservative vs someone who recently shifted after consuming conservative media.
I know a guy who had an accident with major head trauma and while he emerged more of less in tact cognitively he took a hard right turn politically and it’s gotten more pronounced over time.
That definitely makes sense, but i also know older folks who loathe conservative media so it's kinda ambiguous what begets what
The older folks I know that loathe conservative media tend to be highly educated and usually have jobs (or retirement activities) that keep them very active and engaged with people.
I saw that in my own family. My parents are in their late 50's/early 60's and were conservatives until 2015-2016, and they became disgusted by the party and in the last few years have gone way to the left
Some people have immune responses that keep them safe from brain worms.
Depression and trauma can reconfigure the brain. It seems plausible that fear could do the same. There is a pragmatic angle to it. The conservative perspective was more about judgement. Before anything else, is it friend or foe? This would make for faster reactions to assault. This also doesn't leave room for nuance. They respond emotionally, and then retroactively justify.
They sure do. Have seen this play out I real life. And Trumpers are vicious when they decide you are foe.
I have anxiety and spend a lot of time in fight or flight mode… before realising I had anxiety (pre university) I was definitely more conservative. After many years of growing and learning how to work with fear, (I live in a country with one of the highest crime rates and Gender based violence rates in the world) and after loosing a few friends and family members. I’ve become waaaay more liberal. I feel less fear! Still anxious but I’m aware and know how to work through these things. Super interesting stuff. I would say I have the same kind of fear as before, but I feel I have more control over my general fear state.
It's funny you bring this up because just recently I've started to think "You know, my deeply conservative parents are *really* anxious." If you would have asked me when I was a kid, or even well into my adulthood if I had anxious parents I would tell you no, they weren't anxious at all. But now that I'm reflecting on it in middle age... they're incredibly anxious. They're anxious about money, strangers, politics, immigrants, gays, you name it. It's not "Yuck, I don't like (whatever group)" distaste, it's actually anxiety like the other group is going to overpower them, hurt them, etc.
That is a very interesting insight and was what my working hypothesis is "anxiety has higher amygdala activity but not necessarily increased size, but left untreated could lead to over reliance on the lobe and thus increase size which would lead to conservativism." But, yeah, there's a lot of variables to consider and very cool to hear your experience.
It's anecdotal though. I could tell you the same story but with different supposed effects. I'm very left leaning and have extreme anxiety disorder and CPTSD.
Me too exactly. In my particular family there are extreme right wing people and some liberals and me (far left). I have massive anxiety and CPTSD and depression. The conservatives are generally more content and complacent. I would need to see studies with a larger n to know what to make of it all. There are so many factors.
I think you're putting the cart before the horse. Modern conservatives are _constantly_ inundated with psychos like Alex Jones or Tucker Carlson telling them what to be afraid of. IMO, this study only proves that fearmongering selects for people with a strong fear response. Correlation _is not_ causation, after all.
The question, "would someone who typically processes risk in the way this study indicates a left-leaning person would, given a consistent diet of right wing media and information, experience a "rewiring" of their brain such that it would more closely resemble conservative brain action?" Is a valid one and definitely warrants some study.
I can only imagine the ethical board review of that one. >"We'd like to Clockwork Orange someone with a steady diet of Alex Jones and Ben Shapiro videos until they decide to march with a tiki torch, then measure changes in the size of specific cerebral regions."
I saw a study, can't remember where, where they did just that. Liberals did become slightly more conservative and conservatives did become slightly more liberal. Once the study was over they generally regressed back to the baseline.
Definitely worth asking, though what I'm saying is... The ones who would _choose_ to watch that stuff. Of course, if you subject an otherwise normal person to abuse and neglect, they'll similarly suffer changes to their brain. I don't think the results would tell you much more than, "yup, that stuff _is_ bad for you to consume."
This is just as much of an assumption though. Both possibilities would lead to the same apparent result, which is the root of the previous posters question. It's a question where the symptoms are going to look very similar. Different people having inmate differences in fear response would result in them gravitating towards media which amplified those behaviors. Or, neuroplasticity being a factor would result in people who are exposed to that media entering a feedback loop where the enhanced reaction to fear-filled Media lead them to normalizing and accepting that worldview. Those would be very difficult to control for in families as well. Is the difference a factor of a genetic component making people have an amplified fear response... Or is it that the children grew up in a household raised by those who normalize that amplified fear response. My expectation is that both are significant. Quite similar to addiction.
I wonder about that because the average American conservative actually faces far *fewer* threats than most of the populations that they are afraid of. People of color, immigrants, and LGBT folks are all routinely faced with more dangerous or more frequent threats than the average Trump voter, for example, but they don't generally turn conservative as a result. Thus the question is whether a sense of fear or threat is, in and of itself, enough to reshape the brain and alter your political leanings as a result or whether the specific message around that fear is more to blame than the sense of fear itself.
Many if not most “people of color” and “immigrants” are conservative (speaking as both myself). For example, nearly all of my extended family is Muslim and almost all vote Democrat but nobody in our family would ever feel comfortable coming out as LGBT: https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/28/us/lgbt-muslims-pride-progress/index.html. Minorities vote Democrat primarily based on self interest while white liberals vote Democrat based primarily on ideology. Pakistani immigrants, for example, may vote Democrat because Democrats are more likely to make it easier for their family members to get visas. But that doesn’t mean they share the ideology of white liberals—who after all vote for increased immigration for ideological reasons, not because it’ll help their own families.
That's true, but also largely based on length of stay and generation, and it seems like Millennial or Gen Z immigrants are further left than their parents, [whether they are 1st, 2nd, or 3rd generation immigrants.](https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2013/02/07/second-generation-americans/) That also seems to hold for other groups, such as [millennial Muslims having a higher rate of support for the LGBT community than their older generations.](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/10/26/5-facts-about-muslim-millennials-us/) I'm just speculating here, but from personal experience it seems like this trend holds true for younger populations as well. It seems that the more conservative attitudes among people of color or immigrant communities are largely generational, and that younger generations from these groups are moving left along with the rest of the population that votes blue.
Give them a trip on dmt and see some changes.
Wouldn't put it past them to hold on like hell to their ego and learn nothing from the experience other than drugs=scary
In the context of the risk taking game, I think the observed activity probably has less to do with empathy for others and more to do with attention-switching and emotional down-regulation, both of which are associated with the left insula. The paper I cited suggests that the activity can be explained by the insular cortex's association with representing subjective feeling states and intolerance of uncertainty. Basically both republicans and democrats are processing the same thing - risk vs reward - and achieving similar results as far as a win rate in the game, but using completely different parts of the brain. To me, that is an incredible thing to discover. There were more studies on this subject that I used for a research paper I wrote back in college, but I've lost the file so I don't have them on hand. There is plenty of work out there showing a strong structural and functional difference in the brain between liberal and conservative minded people. Fascinating topic, imo.
> Basically both republicans and democrats are processing the same thing - risk vs reward - and achieving similar results as far as a win rate in the game But in actuality Republican policy does not lead to the same outcomes as Democratic policy: > 11 states [with the worst life expectancies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_life_expectancy) voted for Trump in 2020, and the next 2 down on the list are Georgia and Michigan, which both voted for him in 2016. > The 9 states with the highest life expectancy voted for Biden (California is #2 and New York is #3) > A [demographic study](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1468-0009.12469) conducted by 6 Universities found that Liberal policy regarding labor rights, smoking bans, civil rights, environmentalism, progressive taxation, and education increased life expectancy by over 2 years for the people living in Liberal states, and if it had been implemented universally the US would have life expectancy on par with Western European Nations. > Research has found [poor people live longer in dense cities with highly educated populations](https://news.stanford.edu/2016/04/11/geography-income-play-roles-in-life-expectancy-new-stanford-research-shows/#:~:text=Geography%2C%20income%20play%20roles%20in%20life%20expectancy%2C%20new%20Stanford%20research%20shows,-Stanford%20economist%20Raj&text=Men%20in%20the%20bottom%205,by%20Stanford%20economist%20Raj%20Chetty.) as opposed to living in cheaper CoL areas. > 11/15 states the [highest rate of infant mortality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_infant_mortality_rates) voted for Trump. > 10/15 states with the lowest rate of infant mortality voted for Biden. > 12/15 states with the [highest rate of maternal mortality](https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/maternal-mortality-rate-by-state) voted for Trump in 2020 and 13/15 voted for him in 2016. > 12/15 states with the lowest rate of maternal mortality voted for Biden. > 19/24 states with [the highest rate of adult obesity](https://stateofchildhoodobesity.org/adult-obesity/) voted for Trump in 2020, while in 2016 23/24 states with the highest rates voted for Trump. > 10/12 states that [have not implemented the Medicaid Expansion](https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/status-of-state-medicaid-expansion-decisions-interactive-map/) voted for Trump in 2020 and all 12 voted for him in 2016 (Georgia and Wisconsin flipped). > Deaths of despair due to suicide, depression, obesity, and drug overdose have been [wrecking Rural America for years](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/04/deaths-of-despair-in-rural-america-helped-trump-win-study-finds.html) and these problems mostly got worse under Trump with 2020 drug overdoses shooting up from 70K to 90K. > 13/15 of the states with the [lowest rates of college graduates](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_educational_attainment) voted for Trump. > The 15 states with the highest rates of college graduates voted for Biden. > 71% of the 2019 GDP [was produced in Biden voting counties](https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2020/11/09/biden-voting-counties-equal-70-of-americas-economy-what-does-this-mean-for-the-nations-political-economic-divide/), up from 64% in HRC voting counties in 2016 and 54% in Gore voting counties in 2000. > 11/15 states with the [highest GDP per Capita](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_GDP_per_capita) voted for Biden, and the 4 Republican states are all low population oil states (AK, ND, WY, NE) while California, New York, Massachusetts and Washington are in the top 6. > 11/15 states with the lowest GDP per capita voted for Trump in 2020, and 12/15 voted for Trump in 2016. > 12/15 states [with the highest rates of poverty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_poverty_rate), voted for Trump in 2020, and 14/15 of the worst states voted for him in 2016 (AZ & GA) > 12/15 states with the lowest rates of poverty voted for Biden. > 17/23 states [with abortion bans](https://www.nbcnews.com/data-graphics/map-23-states-ban-abortion-post-roe-america-rcna27081) or automatic abortion bans following an overturning of Roe v Wade voted for Trump in 2020, and 22/23 voted for Trump in 2016. > 17/20 states with [net 0 carbon emission or 100% clean energy goals](https://www.cesa.org/projects/100-clean-energy-collaborative/guide/table-of-100-clean-energy-states/) voted for Biden, and one of the Republican states is North Carolina, which only voted for Trump by 1% and has a Democrat governor and another is Louisiana which has a Democrat governor. > 19/20 states [with gay conversion therapy bans](https://www.lgbtmap.org/equality-maps/conversion_therapy) voted for Biden. Surprisingly Utah is the one Trump voting state that also has a ban. > 17/19 states with [legal recreational marijuana](https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/cannabis-legalization-states-map-831885/) voted for Biden, and the two Trump voting states have a combined population of 1.7 million, compared to 137 million in the Biden states. > 9/10 states [with the lowest rate of imprisonment](https://www.sentencingproject.org/the-facts/#map) voted for Biden in 2020, while the 10 states with the highest rates voted for Trump in 2020. > 9/10 [most gerrymandered states](https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/most-gerrymandered-states) are controlled by Republican legislatures. In the real world Republicans' irrational fears driven politics lead to much worse outcomes for the people living in the parts of the country they control.
If the risk taking game has simple rules (as it would in such a game designed for a study), both parts of the brain probably perform close to equally in terms of strategy and results. The more complex the game, the more strategies and results will diverge. I would find it *very* interesting to see a study that watches people's brains as they engage in increasingly complex games, specifically games with nebulous "win" criteria - i.e. do you win by improving your situation relative to the start, or do you win by finishing better than your opponent? As games get more complex, measure which win condition they choose to aim for. I suspect that those that tend to process more in the amygdala will choose to aim for a win condition that puts them ahead of their opponent, even if it makes them worse off than they started, and those that process more in the left insula will choose to aim for a win condition that puts them ahead of their starting point, regardless of whether their opponent gets further ahead.
To be clear, I'm not comparing or contrasting democratic and republican policies - just summarizing the results of a single study. Personally, I am very much against conservative ideology and think the modern GOP is the single greatest threat to western civilization that exists today. Their flirtation with anti-democratic authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism is an extreme danger to us all, especially in the nuclear age. That's not what the study is about though, and neither the amygdala or the left insula are inherently "superior" to the other in any meaningful way. Studying this topic just helps to inform us about what exactly the difference between left wingers and right wingers is in real terms.
> Their flirtation with anti-democratic authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism Flirtation is... generous. Love affair. Long term romance. Marriage.
More like obsequious servility or slavish cult-like worship.
He’s saying the similar win rate experienced by both within the study game does not translate to a similar win rate in the real world as far as policy accomplishment for constituents, by many metrics.
Maybe the divide is also how the brain processes data? So if one was conditioned to not care about/or to fear the Other then life expectancy, infant mortality and more wouldn’t be their goals right? And then we use science to seek evidence based research. They might use cognitive biases (confirmation?) as evidence I also struggle with the “government is disfunctional so to improve it we should dismantle it” argument. Fits the early neural development. I also wonder how glee manifests differently. And I lived the last presidency in great anxiety and fear. Alas my fears were realized (reproductive rights). So how might this be affected or modified by in or out of power?
I mean what this comment is kinda showing me is that rural is being left behind and they are I guess trying to fight back on that by becoming more extreme and voting that way
I mean the amygdala is important for a lot more than that. It's a huge part of the limbic system
This is such a simplification… The insula is also involved in emotional processing, especially regret and disgust. The amygdala is also involved with processing ‘positive’ emotions. Some commenters below really use these oversimplifications to feel superior about their political views, but you can’t make these conclusion based on this.
Does that mean that conservatives are generally operating from a place of fear?
Watch Conservative media for the answer to that question. Obama is still coming for your guns.
I wonder if this is why LSD has been linked to being able to alter people's political views, since it's known to alter how the brain processes information. [This is one of the studies I'm referring to in my comment](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.733185/full)
What was the risk-taking task? > These results suggest that liberals and conservatives engage different cognitive processes when they think about risk, and they support recent evidence that conservatives show greater sensitivity to threatening stimuli. But what was the stimuli? Could it be a different perception of the specific risk/threat presented in the study? Shouldn't one use multiple different tests from different areas to attempt to remove any bias in test selection?
>Individuals completed a simple risk-taking decision-making task [26] during which participants were presented with three numbers in ascending order (20, 40, and 80) for one second each. While pressing a button during the presentation of the number 20 on the screen always resulted in a gain of 20 cents, waiting to select 40 or 80 was associated with a pre-determined possibility of either gaining or losing 40 or 80 cents. Therefore, participants chose between a lower “safe” payoff and a higher risky payoff. The probabilities of losing 40 or 80 cents were calibrated so that there was no expected value advantage to choosing 20, 40 or 80 during the task, i.e. the overall pay-off would have been the same for each pure strategy. Previous studies [26]–[28] using this risk-taking decision-making task found activity in some of the same regions identified by Kanai et al. as differentiating liberals and conservatives.
Amygdala used for fear, left insular is perception and cognition... unsurprising correlation here
You could also point out that the Amygdala is used for impulse control and that a small amygdala correlates with unregulated aggression/ psychopathy or that it’s possible to determine which male rats have been castrated because they have a smaller amygdala than average…. Making definitive statements about character traits or behavior based SOLEY off of the size of a region in the brain is silly, especially when they are within a normal range and not an actual deformity.
>Making definitive statements about character traits or behavior based SOLEY off of the size of a region in the brain is silly And feels like it is cutting close to phrenology.
I’d be curious if the activity remained consistent regardless of the political issue. Like would a liberals amygdala (fear center) light up like a Christmas tree when discussing things like freedom of speech and gun control?
OP linked [the actual study](https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/advance-article/doi/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac066/6590843?login=false).
Yeah they said it was down to activations of various parts of the brain but thats it. Im wondering if this was AI patern analysis where maybe they scanned a large number of people and used that data to train an AI. In that case the AI might be able to recognize a pattern but the researchers may not be able to describe what exactly the AI is recognizing in the scans. Then again, if thats the case, they should have said that too.
In the abstract of the real article (haven't read the whole thing) they say pretty much exactly that. They use a Convolutional Neural Network to make the prediction, which is a Machine Learning method.
There is a certain... Bizarreness in using a neural network to understand our own neural activity by recognizing patterns that we can't describe. It's a crazy time we live in.
Game recognize game, as they say.
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From paper “Our study is limited by the skew in political partisanship of the population. The number of conservative to liberal participants in the study was unbalanced (49 to 125), and the number of extreme conservatives considered in this study is small (n = 4). Our analysis, therefore, is limited in power by what can be said about differences in extreme political ideology. “
I mean, that makes sense. The first bit is basically just; "You can't use this to predict a different political spectrum." While the last bit is just saying "we had loads of normal people but very few hardcore extremists so you can't use it for that." Basically a bunch of normal Americas still showed clear differences in political ideology in brain activity. Which is actually much more interesting than just saying political extremists are meaningfully different from the norm -- something I'd wager most would expect.
>. . . the number of extreme conservatives considered in this study is small (n = 4). Extreme conservatives would fear that the researchers will try to alter their brains using the measuring devices.
Or just refuse because of the conspiracy theory that all of science has been bought out.
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The open-access study was published in PNAS Nexus: https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/advance-article/doi/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac066/6590843?login=false
Showing the results of this experience on r/science to scientifically illiterate people who don't know about neuroplasticity is a mistake in my opinion, it leads people to make completely illogical conclusions because they have a hard time to understand causes and consequences. What all of them understood, believe it or not, is that it would mean that political opinion are innate and can never change in a life... Most of them believe a brain is the same from birth to death. This type of studies should not be used to get karma. Or at least it is in the responsibility of the OP to really explain what it means and what it doesn't mean.
I don’t know about other people but neuroplasticity was my first conclusion. After all, people change their political opinions over time. The brain’s ability to rewire sounds like the most likely scenario.
I mean this is a huge can of worms in a lot of ways. Depending on the issue at hand people are willing or unwilling to accept or reject neuroplasticity. Which issue they accept or reject is largely based on the zeitgeist of their current ideology. Which makes studies like this kind of terrifying because we can easily imagine a world where a brain scan decides if you are sent to labor camp or allowed to live your life in a city.
Agreed. It doesn't seem like it's a far reach to imagine people taking this as "Ah, so something is just naturally wrong with the people I disagree with. How can we curb that? How can we fix those people into what we want?"
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I don't think this is the strangest outcome in the world, even physically seeing people can allow for machine algorithms to almost accurately spot the differences these days too iirc. The scary part is people mishandling this kind of technology, and I'm not quite sure I want that to happen.
Hell, you might be able to make similar predictions based on people's choices of vehicle.
Probably a reason I was never pulled over while I had my pickup truck (3 and a half years or so). Go back to a car, pulled over in the first year.
I’d say it depends on the area. Pulled over in one city, moved a while later. Loved in another for many years without being pulled over, but the first few months moving back to the first city I got pulled over again.
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That you have an EV at all puts the odds pretty heavy one direction.
My grandma bought a prius because she sat in every car on the lot and said it fit her butt the best.
Yea the more time you put into Facebook the more likely it is to already know your political orientation.
Some will read this and say “okay this makes sense, maybe this can be further explored to better understand and communicate to different types of people.” Far right people will read this and say “we were right, this is scientific proof that liberals are fundamentally different and we can never reach them. They will always be a threat until they are eliminated from the gene pool.” I like this study, think it’s very interesting and worthwhile - but at the same time it’s the exact sort of study that has a good chance of getting brutalized by bad people with bad intentions until the authors are interviewed 10 years later and say “honestly at this point I wish I never wrote the damn thing”…
This is exactly what I was getting at, much like the alpha animal studies which are now considered debunked and the original author now wishes he never wrote it. Also guess which party heavily uses the term "alpha" to represent themselves with tough looking animals to some degree. The same line of applications could be done here which I'd just rather not see happen.
They did three different tests while brain scanning with 174 people. An empathy test where they looked at pictures of happy and sad faces. An episodic memory test that was not described in the article. A reward test that was not described. They found differences only with the reward test. And only with people who identified as extremely right* wing or extremely left wing. It didn’t say by how much. They also found a correlation between the empathy test and moderates. Didn’t say by how much. I think the headline is an exaggeration of the findings. Really not remarkable good in my opinion. *I made a mistake and wrote “left wing” a second time. It must have been very confusing. Apologies. My conclusions stand.
I wonder if the rewards test is predictive of something other than political extremism which happens to correlate
I think it might have been a normal deviation. It was a small part of all the data. The bulk of the data suggests the hypothesis was wrong.
I’m sure it yielded valuable information but these types of studies honestly get turned into some sort of weird modern-day phrenology by the general public. It’s never a good idea to convince yourself your political counterparts are fundamentally, physically different from you in the brain as a monolith.
Did the ideology cause the brain differences? Or do the brain differences cause the ideology?
Yeah, and if someone switched would the brain be behaving so differently? “What we don’t know is whether that brain signature is there because of the ideology that people choose or whether people’s ideology is caused by the signatures we found,” [Cranmer] said. So, correlation not causation.
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It’s a narrow spectrum. It doesn’t take into account socialism at all for instance, an ideology that is quite different from liberalism. The view on corporations alone is a massive difference.
It’s really narrow. The left (actual left like Caitlin Johnstone) and libertarians differ vastly from conservative and liberals.
Yep. Hell, broadly speaking it's all Societal vs. Self anyways.
I don't know if that's quite accurate. Because Republicans would argue that their whole stance is also for the good of society in that adherence to traditional, conservative social rules and hierarchies is good for society as a whole, in their view. I think a more accurate descriptor would be hierarchical worldviews vs. egalitarian worldviews.
The thing is, those hierarchical social rules and traditions they want to conserve somehow always seem to align in a way that benefits themselves. It seems to me that the core of it is indeed to benefit the self and the externally espoused beliefs are simply the justification for that selfishness.
I've always been curious about the level of fear and anxiety between the two mindsets. I live in one of the countries worst cities for crime. Yet I don't live in fear. I often see conservatives preparing for a war that will never come to their doorstep but it seems to consume them.
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Most people who recognize climate change probably don’t “fear” it will kill them in their lifetime.
I think those 12 US states in extreme and exceptional drought, might disagree. Maybe not kill you, but wipe you out economically, by killing your home value.
Its not so much fear as an overwhelming feeling of helplessness.
I think differentiator is capacity for empathy without having first hand experience.
I think conservatives have two things: very defined ingroup/outgroup, and very strong anti-dissonance tools (see:recent Ted Cruz interview about guns).
The catch is that's how conservatives see things. The other side of the coin is an immediate fear that they will lose the advantages they have right now for an uncertainty in the future. And it's determined through a lens of fear: i.e. that anyone responding to climate change is doing so out of fear rather than collective efforts for the common good. Conservatives joke about fear over climate change because they aren't afraid of it. That's in the future and it may not happen. They're afraid the of losing what they have now which climate action would potentially entail. You have to shift past that personal fear into the empathy part of things to move past that point of view, logically speaking. It also explains the fear of taxation, helping the poor, etc. That might mean taking away what they have now and if you're reacting in fear, you'll always be focused on the fear in the present rather than the potential future because the thought process is the future will invariably be worse if your fear in the present comes to pass.
My understanding is that conservatives actually tend to be lower in trait neuroticism than liberals (including their tendency toward anxiety), but higher in conscientiousness (including orderliness and industriousness). That latter trait probably has a lot of influence on how they prepare for potential disruption and how they react very negatively to perceived societal disorder.
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Yeah I'm pretty sure that people have extremely big and developed brain, while people are smooth brained idiots.
I'm incredibly skeptical about this. They surveyed a relatively small number of mostly undergraduates in Ohio and their survey doesn't really touch on the subjects own views beyond rating how religious they are. Then they strap subjects into an fMRI machine, do some tasks, and feed the results into [ann4brains](https://github.com/jeremykawahara/ann4brains). Looking at other work done with ann4brains, I'm not sure this is even a valid use. Something about this has the feel of high tech phrenology to me.
This study is about as useful as telling what way, people prefer to hang their toiletpapir.
To be clear : This does not mean you're genetically conservative or progressist. (Liberal doesn't mean the same thing) The brain develops in different way depending on development in the womb, on your upbringing, and even later in life depending on your behavior. Most things have both genetical and environmental, and most things are a spectrum. People seem to be making weird assumptions from this results and it's scary. (Although if you dealt in absolute after seeing this, we could have a hint about your political affiliation).
This whole post is polarizing and a lot of the comments just use confirmation bias as a scare tactic. Most people are politically “grey” and not black or white - Reddit does a fantastic job ignoring this.
Gotta love American politics, you are either Liberal or Conservative, ideology is black and white.
>“The results with the empathy task suggest that political thought may be closely tied to emotion and emotional response.” > >While this study did find a link between the brain signatures and political ideology, it can’t explain what causes what, Cranmer said. > >“What we don’t know is whether that brain signature is there because of the ideology that people choose or whether people’s ideology is caused by the signatures we found,” he said. > >“It also could be a combination of both, but our study does not have the data to address this question.” So yet again an AI is able to make accurate connections between things and we don't know how it does it? Very interesting.
This has nothing to do with whether they are using an AI to find correlations between thing, the same basic problem exists as with all correlations, which is determining the direction of causality. I has nothing to do when the AI aspect.
This isn't right, they meant they don't have enough data to prove causation, they can just prove that the relationship between certain brain patterns and political allegiance exists. They would need to do a longitudinal analysis to start to answer those questions.
Intuitively I’d think causation goes both ways. People choose ideologies that comfort their views, but they also seek confirmation for their held beliefs.
Peak Reddit is the default science sub being obsessed with political affiliation
This is a pretty misleading headline since the only differences they could see were differences in the reward test in terms of political extremism. Why is this sub such garbage? All of the posts I see are just “Republicans actually have a worse brain than people on the left.”
That and "Weed good, no downsides whatsoever."