Brain Differences between Liberals and Conservatives found

[Pondlife]

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/...ck=1&cset=true

Study finds left-wing brain, right-wing brain
Even in humdrum nonpolitical decisions, liberals and conservatives literally think differently, researchers show.
By Denise Gellene, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 10, 2007
Exploring the neurobiology of politics, scientists have found that liberals tolerate ambiguity and conflict better than conservatives because of how their brains work.

In a simple experiment reported todayin the journal Nature Neuroscience, scientists at New York University and UCLA show that political orientation is related to differences in how the brain processes information.

Previous psychological studies have found that conservatives tend to be more structured and persistent in their judgments whereas liberals are more open to new experiences. The latest study found those traits are not confined to political situations but also influence everyday decisions.

The results show "there are two cognitive styles -- a liberal style and a conservative style," said UCLA neurologist Dr. Marco Iacoboni, who was not connected to the latest research.

Participants were college students whose politics ranged from "very liberal" to "very conservative." They were instructed to tap a keyboard when an M appeared on a computer monitor and to refrain from tapping when they saw a W.

M appeared four times more frequently than W, conditioning participants to press a key in knee-jerk fashion whenever they saw a letter.

Each participant was wired to an electroencephalograph that recorded activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that detects conflicts between a habitual tendency (pressing a key) and a more appropriate response (not pressing the key). Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W, researchers said. Liberals and conservatives were equally accurate in recognizing M.

Researchers got the same results when they repeated the experiment in reverse, asking another set of participants to tap when a W appeared.

Frank J. Sulloway, a researcher at UC Berkeley's Institute of Personality and Social Research who was not connected to the study, said the results "provided an elegant demonstration that individual differences on a conservative-liberal dimension are strongly related to brain activity."

Analyzing the data, Sulloway said liberals were 4.9 times as likely as conservatives to show activity in the brain circuits that deal with conflicts, and 2.2 times as likely to score in the top half of the distribution for accuracy.

Sulloway said 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, the liberal Massachusetts Democrat who opposed Bush in the 2004 presidential race, as a "flip-flopper" for changing his mind about the conflict.

Based on the results, he said, liberals could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas.

"There is ample data from the history of science showing that social and political liberals indeed do tend to support major revolutions in science," said Sulloway, who has written about the history of science and has studied behavioral differences between conservatives and liberals.

Lead author David Amodio, an assistant professor of psychology at New York University, cautioned that the study looked at a narrow range of human behavior and that it would be a mistake to conclude that one political orientation was better. The tendency of conservatives to block distracting information could be a good thing depending on the situation, he said.

Political orientation, he noted, occurs along a spectrum, and positions on specific issues, such as taxes, are influenced by many factors, including education and wealth. Some liberals oppose higher taxes and some conservatives favor abortion rights.

Still, he acknowledged that a meeting of the minds between conservatives and liberals looked difficult given the study results.

"Does this mean liberals and conservatives are never going to agree?" Amodio asked. "Maybe it suggests one reason why they tend not to get along."

denise.gellene@latimes.com

Reputation Comments on this post:

interesting, and long suspected ;)

[Joe Duffy]

Interesting!

[LookingForHer]

You mean conversatives are stubborn idiots who can't change their minds no matter what reality tells them?

[beentheredonethatagain]

this study show nothing of value, You can make up a study and inturpet the results to mean just about anything you want.
There should be some noticable differences between liberals and conservatives. for example liberals are name callers, see above post

[rxbandit]

The guidlines for how the conservatives brain works sounds indicative of a low IQ.

[Nature Boy]

This does not so much demonstrate the difference between conservatives and liberals but more the consolidating vs. progressive individual mindsets. Still though, the study was probably not very expansive and realistically, liberals generally outnumber conservatives in universities greatly (definitely at NYU) so the so-called conservatives chosen for this test would be at an automatic disadvantage seeing as there's less of them. Less conservatives, less dudes with a big 'R' planted on their forehead that happen to be good at tapping a keyboard.

I'd like to see this trial done using a bunch of middle-aged subjects just out of interest seeing as conservatism comes with age in many cases. Haha, maybe it's the decreased reaction timing.

[Pondlife]

Here's a link to the full article in PDF format:

http://www.psych.nyu.edu/amodiolab/Amodio%20et%20al.%20(2007)%20Nature%20Neuro.pdf

The title and abstract reads:

Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism

David M Amodio, John T Jost, Sarah L Master & Cindy M Yee

Political scientists and psychologists have noted that, on
average, conservatives show more structured and persistent
cognitive styles, whereas liberals are more responsive to
informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty. We tested the
hypothesis that these profiles relate to differences in general
neurocognitive functioning using event-related potentials, and
found that greater liberalism was associated with stronger
conflict-related anterior cingulate activity, suggesting greater
neurocognitive sensitivity to cues for altering a habitual
response pattern.

Note that the lead researcher, David Amodio, has used similar scans in other areas (primarily racial bias) and has a fairly good reputation (i.e. he's not a wacko). That doesn't mean that the study cannot be flawed of course - there are lots of ways that it could be wrong (for example the sample size is quite small, and it uses a binary political system). However, it probably shouldn't be dismissed out of hand without careful consideration.

[Perception Addict]

I think this is pretty fascinating. Keep in mind that though there is a high population of liberals in the college world, there are also a significant number of fespectable schools that are highly conservative, which became very apparent to me when i was looking into schools to attend (or in that case, not attend). If the experiment was as credible as I would hope it would be, being affiliated with NYU and UCLA, potential minority of conservatives would have been accounted for.

It would be interesting to hear more of the details of this study, for instance, was there an equal number of each category (strong liberal, strong conservative, etc.)?

Also, did the strong and moderate members of each party have different results?

Admittedly, this sounds like somewhat inconclusive evidence, since this seems like the type of experiment in which it would be very difficult to remove the many extraneous variables, but i still think that some interesting comparisons were drawn, and would be interested to read about further experiments.