Brain Differences In Liberals and Conservatives

i_like_spam writes "Scientists from NYU and UCLA report in Nature Neuroscience that the brains of Democrats and Republicans process information differently. This new study finds that the differences are apparent even when the brain processes common information, not just political topics. From the study, liberals were more likely to be accurate and showed more brain activity in the region associated with analyzing conflicts. A researcher not affiliated with the study stated, liberals 'could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas.' Moreover, 'the results could explain why President Bush demonstrated a single-minded commitment to the Iraq war and why some people perceived Sen. John F. Kerry... as a flip-flopper.'"

Comments

Experimental design

[tucuxi]

The linked site is scarce on details - the paper itself is more interesting. First, David Amodio (lead researcher) is not obviously flaming. I'm no expert in neuroscience -- but the data looks good, and he has a track record on usage of scans for similar tasks (most of it race-bias related, but that's another subject).

Here's an interesting part of the experimental design:

To test the hypothesis that political liberalism (versus conservatism) would be associated with greater conict-related ACC activity, we recorded electroencephalographs from 43 right-handed subjects (63% female) as they performed the Go/No-Go task. Subjects reported their political attitudes condentially on a -5 (extremely liberal) to +5 (extremely conservative) scale. This single-item measure has been found to account for approximately 85% of the statistical variance in presidential voting intentions in American National Election studies between 1972 and 2004 (ref. 8). Among participants in the present study who reported voting in the 2004 presidential election, a more liberal (versus conservative) ideological orientation strongly predicted voting for John Kerry versus George Bush (r(21)= 0.79, P o 0.001).

I think that there are two ways in which the experiment may be flawed. One is that 43 persons are not enough to extrapolate to the whole US population; and more importantly, no details are given on how they were chosen. If they were chosen among colleagues in an academic setting, where most people (your mileage may vary) are left-wing, you may have problems finding people which self-describe as conservative. These few would be most resistant to changing their viewpoints, I would guess -- since otherwise they may have flipped from exposure to liberal arguments.

Another way in which I think the study may be flawed is by asking people to self-define their position in the political spectrum -- a one-dimensional political spectrum. What guarantees do you have that participants really are "conservative" or "liberal" (whatever that means to you), and have actually thought about the political issues involved in each "choice" (as if there weren't many, many greys)?. A 2-dimensional political positioning would provide more insight. A short questionnaire where participants actually had to think, instead of "choosing their favorite color" would have been even better.

This is assuming that the researcher knows what he's doing, and the

conflict-related ACC activity was indexed by two ERP components. ERPs are scalp-recorded voltage changes reflecting the concerted firing of neurons in response to a psychological event. is actually a good measure of resistance to change or willingness to accomodate it. No details are provided on the exact activity, other than stating that parcicipants were offered the choice of two actions, "Go" and "No-Go".

You can find the full article at the author's lab website.

Re:Could age be a factor?

[ErroneousBee]

Well spotted.

The paper is still in the preview part of natures website, so I couldn't get to the full text.

David M. Amodio has done similar trials, where responses are timed (otherwise, the subject could just take their time and get a 100% hitrate). Heres an example where latencies are measured. I have assumed a very similar method was used in both experiments.
http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/1/1/26

Re:Could age be a factor?

[greenguy]

I'm disappointed that no one has quoted David Hume yet:

"Not all conservatives are stupid, but it is true that most stupid people are conservative."

Re:It's math or mathematics

[psmears]

Only non-native English speakers says "maths". It's "math", or if you must "mathematics" Carry on. Wrong. Native English speakers say "maths". Where are you from?

Re:This is very good news

[darkmeridian]

Dude. The country twice elected Bill Clinton right before they elected King George. Clinton was a poor kid from the South whose real dad died, and whose step-dad was a mean, drunk SOB who beat his mom up all the time. Life gave him no handouts, and he had to earn everything he ever had. From this background, he became an Oxford scholar. He went to law school and was voted governor of Arkansas. On the national TV circuit, his obvious intelligence and warmth made him the closest thing a President got to being a rock star since Kennedy.

I have faith in my country that it will find its way again. We are not always prone to electing the rich and powerful only because they are rich and powerful. We rejected Perot, and we'll reject the next guy who wants to be President because his Daddy was President.