According to the largest study of its type, brain scans of participants collected as they performed various tasks—or simply did nothing—accurately indicated whether they were politically conservative or liberal.
Researchers discovered that the “signatures” in the brain revealed by the scans were just as good at predicting political ideology as the greatest predictor commonly employed in political science studies, a person’s parents’ ideology.
“Can we understand political conduct just by looking at the brain? The answer is an emphatic “yes.” “Skyler Cranmer, the Phillips and Henry Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University, is one of the study’s co-authors.
“The findings show that political conduct has biological and neurological underpinnings that are considerably deeper than previously considered.”
The study, which was just published in the journal PNAS Nexus, is the largest to date to examine political ideology using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) images of the brain.
It’s also one of the only studies to look at functional connectivity in relation to ideology, using a whole-brain method to see whether sections of the brain displayed comparable patterns of activity at the same time when completing various activities, showing that they’re interacting.
The scans were analyzed using cutting-edge artificial intelligence techniques and the facilities of the Ohio Supercomputer Center. They discovered links between the scan findings and the participants’ assessments of their ideology, which ranged from “extremely liberal” to “very conservative” on a six-point scale.
The data comes from the Ohio State University Wellbeing research, which featured 174 healthy people in an fMRI scanner doing typical activities commonly utilized in scientific investigations.
“None of the eight activities was planned to generate partisan answers,” said research co-author Seo-Eun Yang, who completed the work as a doctorate student at Ohio State and is now an assistant professor of political science at Northeastern University.
“However, we discovered that the scans from all eight tasks were connected to whether they identified as conservatives or liberals.”
According to co-author James Wilson, assistant professor of psychiatry and biostatistics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, even when individuals were instructed to sit quietly and think of nothing in particular, the subsequent scans revealed a link to political ideology.
“Functional connection in the brain can help us anticipate a person’s political leaning even without any input,” Wilson added.
While the participants’ ideology was predicted by the scans from all eight tasks, three activities exhibited especially high connections.
One of the tasks was an empathy exercise in which participants were given photographs of emotional individuals with neutral, joyful, sad, and terrified expressions. The second task tested episodic memory, and the third was a money-based reward task in which individuals may gain or lose money depending on how quickly they pressed a button.
Only the reward task scans were able to predict political extremism among individuals who claimed to be highly conservative or very liberal. Only the empathy (emotional faces) test was linked to moderate ideology in a substantial way.
Wilson stated, “More research is needed to understand the link between incentive decision-making and radical political ideas.”
“The results of the empathy task imply that political ideas and emotional reaction are inextricably linked.”
While this research discovered a correlation between brain signatures and political ideology, it does not explain why, according to Cranmer.
“What we don’t know is whether that brain signature is there because of people’s ideologies or whether the signatures we uncovered create people’s ideologies,” he added.
“It might possibly be a combination of both, but we don’t have the data to answer that question in our study.”
The fact that the brain scans predicted ideology, as well as the level of parental ideology, was noteworthy in and of itself, according to the researchers.
However, when the brain data were merged with demographic and socioeconomic characteristics such as age, gender, income, and education, the resulting model predicted a person’s ideology even better than their parents’ ideology.
“Functional connection and all survey-based responses offered the greatest prediction ability of any model we investigated,” Yang added.
Cranmer emphasized how this study differed from others that had also employed brain scans to investigate ideology.
“We saw the brain as a complicated system of areas interacting with one another to create these actions. Most prior research have looked at one area of the brain in isolation to determine how it was active or not when subjects were exposed to political stimuli “he said. The amygdala, inferior frontal gyrus, and hippocampus were shown to be the most significantly connected with political allegiance in this study.
