Quick Hits
Daily brief research updates from the cognitive sciences
Brain scanning of political partisans is not new and it has long been reported that brain scans can predict political affiliation. But those studies were scans of political partisans in situation that elicited emotional responses such as looking at pictures of political candidates or asking questions on policy issues.
The question these researchers wanted to answer is can you predict a person’s political affiliation just by looking at their brains while they were doing random tasks or even nothing at all!
What did these researchers at Ohio State University do?
The researchers recruited 174 participants to take part in the study and questioned them on their political affiliation and the intensity of this. They then underwent various brain scans while doing various standard testing activities. These activities were unrelated to politics. These included reward response tasks, clicking quickly on screen to receive a reward, empathy tasks, short-term memory task, episodic memory, matching names to faces, and more.
Interestingly they also did resting state scans, scanning the brain while doing nothing.
By measuring functional connectivity i.e. how brain regions connect they were then able to match correlations to political ideologies.
What did they find?
And yes, they found that using this functional connectivity they could predict political affiliation as effectively as with the best other predictor. What is the best other predictor you may ask? It is the political affiliation of your parents.
What is more interesting is that this correlation was just as effective by looking at resting state brain activity – so by looking at your brain at rest they could predict political affiliation.
It is not a perfect correlation but nevertheless intriguing and fascinating at the same time.
An additional note is that the reward task was most predictive of political extremism, showing a surprisingly high corelation, which shows that politics seem to resolve around emotionality. Just what this could mean is another question for further research.
So, is there a conservative brain and liberal brain (in the USA that is)? It certainly seems so●
Andy Habermacher
Andy is author of leading brains Review, Neuroleadership, and multiple other books. He has been intensively involved in writing and research into neuroleadership and is considered one of Europe’s leading experts. He is also a well-known public speaker speaking on the brain and human behaviour.
Andy is also a masters athlete (middle distance running) and competes regularly at international competitions (and holds a few national records in his age category).
Reference
Seo-Eun Yang, James D Wilson, Zhong-Lin Lu, Skyler Cranmer.
Functional Connectivity Signatures of Political Ideology.
PNAS Nexus, 2022;
DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac066
More Quick Hits
Your brain on near-death experiences
Near-death experiences have fascinated many people ever since they have been reported. And these experiences guide our view of how we die: the memories of your life passing in front of your eyes, the tunnel of light, the floating movement towards a bright light....
Social networks grow your brain
The headline is a bit “click baity” but it is what a group of researchers found. To be more specific they found in macaques (cute monkeys) in the wild that having more grooming partners grew different regions of the brain. Grooming is the primate version of having a...
What do creative brains look like?
We’d probably all be happy to be a bit more creative — though research into our own opinions show that many people do actually consider themselves to be above average in creativity. An obvious self-bias. This is where scientists who study creativity come in and find...
New gender biases discovered
There have been many studies on gender biases, and I have followed, written, and spoken about many of these biases over the years (over a decade actually) but two studies have just come out that caught my eye. One out of New York University focused on gender natural...
Growth of your brain over your life
So, we all know that our brain grows very quickly as babies and children and then after a certain age, younger than some of us may like to think, there begins a slow decline. But precisely what and how is the question. Well, this is a question that an international...
How to reduce loneliness
I have reported multiple times on loneliness during the pandemic – mostly because interest and research into loneliness has taken a large uptick. I have also reported on how to combat this and was happy to see that a piece of research just out proved what I had...