But some statements were surprising, such as a conservative expressing a pro-choice position or a liberal arguing for invading Iran. Most statements were what you would expect: Republicans, for instance, usually favor increasing defense spending, and Democrats generally support expanding Medicare. To study how we process political information in a 2017 paper, political psychologist Ingrid Haas of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and her colleagues created hypothetical candidates from both major parties and assigned each candidate a set of policy statements on issues such as school prayer, Medicare and defense spending. Yet “neurobiological features could be used as a predictor of political outcomes-just not in a deterministic way,” Nam says. “Participants may be induced to be more honest when they think that scientists have a ‘window’ into their brains.” That is not to say that political neuroscience can be used as a tool to “read minds,” but it can pick up discrepancies between stated positions and underlying cognitive processes.īrain scans are also unlikely to be used as a biomarker for specific political results because the relationships between the brain and politics is not one-to-one. “Brain structure and function provide more objective measures than many types of survey responses,” says political neuroscientist Hannah Nam of Stony Brook University. Political neuroscience, however, attempts to deepen these observations by supplying evidence that a belief or bias manifests as a measure of brain volume or activity-demonstrating that an attitude, conviction or misconception is, in fact, genuine. Social scientists who observe behaviors in the political sphere can gain substantial insight into the hazards of errant partisanship. Knowing this will not magically bring us all together, but researchers hope that continuing to understand the way partisanship influences our brain might at least allow us to counter its worst effects: the divisiveness that can tear apart the shared values required to retain a sense of national unity. Partisanship does not just affect our vote it influences our memory, reasoning and even our perception of truth. So what can the study of neural activity suggest about political behavior? The still emerging field of political neuroscience has begun to move beyond describing basic structural and functional brain differences between people of different ideological persuasions-gauging who has the biggest amygdala-to more nuanced investigations of how certain cognitive processes underlie our political thinking and decision-making. There is also an unresolved chicken-and-egg problem: Do brains start out processing the world differently or do they become increasingly different as our politics evolve? Furthermore, it is still not entirely clear how useful it is to know that a Republican’s brain lights up over X while a Democrat’s responds to Y. The political landscape includes lefties who own guns, right-wingers who drive Priuses and everything in between. While these findings are remarkably consistent, they are probabilities, not certainties-meaning there is plenty of individual variability. And the amygdala, which is important for regulating emotions and evaluating threats, is larger in conservatives. The volume of gray matter, or neural cell bodies, making up the anterior cingulate cortex, an area that helps detect errors and resolve conflicts, tends to be larger in liberals. If you had put Buckley and Vidal in a magnetic resonance imaging machine and presented them with identical images, you would likely have seen differences in their brain, especially in the areas that process social and emotional information. On the whole, the research shows, conservatives desire security, predictability and authority more than liberals do, and liberals are more comfortable with novelty, nuance and complexity.
The authors, a trio of political scientists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Rice University, argued that if the differences between liberals and conservatives seem profound and even unbridgeable, it is because they are rooted in personality characteristics and biological predispositions. The story of the 1968 debate opens a well-regarded 2013 book called Predisposed, which introduced the general public to the field of political neuroscience. Afterward, they sued each other for defamation. Instead Buckley and Vidal descended rapidly into name-calling. It was hoped that these two members of opposing intellectual elites would show Americans living through tumultuous times that political disagreements could be civilized. Buckley, Jr., and liberal writer Gore Vidal. In 1968 a debate was held between conservative thinker William F.
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