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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: skinowski who wrote (223249)	10/10/2007 10:30:16 AM
From: Snowshoe	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793587

Study finds left-wing brain, right-wing brain latimes.com 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."

To: skinowski who wrote (223249)	10/10/2007 10:31:28 AM
From: Snowshoe	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793587

Some 2006 brain/politics articles: neuropolitics.org

To: skinowski who wrote (223249)	10/10/2007 11:51:50 AM
From: koan	Respond to of 793587

UC Davis home > Egghead Red brain, blue brain September 10th, 2007 @ 10:33 am by Andy A study published over the weekend in Nature Neuroscience shows that “liberals” and “conservatives” show some differences in brain activity during decision making, according to the authors. Students in the study were fitted with a cap to measure electrical activity in their brains and shown a stream of Ms and Ws on screen. They were supposed to press a button if they saw a particular letter, but only given fractions of a second to do so. The researchers were looking for activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, a part of the brain involved in decision making. Students who self-described themselves as liberal did slightly better (34 mistakes out of 100) than conservatives (44 out of 100). The conservatives were more likely to push the button regardless, while the liberals spent longer considering it. There is a sort of “hold on here” alert in the anterior cingulate cortex, a brain wave seen just before people successfully resist pushing the button. And there’s a “whoops” response afterward if they get it wrong, a brain wave that comes once people realize they’ve pushed that darn button when they shouldn’t have. That signal may also be associated with learning from our mistakes. Both responses were consistently stronger in the liberal students and weaker in the conservatives. When it goes overboard, stronger or weaker activity in the anterior cingulate cortex can be big trouble. People with high activity there can be anxious, and in the worst case, obsessive-compulsive, unable to let things go, said Dr. Cameron Carter, a UC Davis psychiatry professor whose cognitive neuroscience research often focuses on that region of the brain. People with low activity there are “undersocialized,” with less empathy for others, Carter said. In the extreme, they are psychopaths. Carter, who reviewed the Nature Neuroscience study at The Bee’s request, called it “quite solid,” with sound methods and robust results. (Andy’s note: Carter was not otherwise involved in the study, which was done at New York University and UCLA.) In Carrie Peyton-Dahlberg’s story in the Bee, some political operatives (mostly Democrats) are amused. While the authors are, by the sound of it, at pains not to make value judgments, coauthor John Jost told the Bee that there are other studies that support the idea of different personality types being drawn to different political viewpoints. Conservatives tend to be conscientious, consistent and structured, while liberals lean toward open-minded, creative and messy, Jost said in an e-mail. He believes this new research may be the first to also document different activity in a specific area of the brain. John J. Pitney Jr., a government professor at Claremont McKenna College in Southern California who has worked for the Republican National Committee, makes the sensible point that “Liberals and conservatives are, I think, equally prone to making mistakes.” The study also involved a relatively small number of subjects (43) from a relatively narrow group (college students at NYU and UCLA). One commenter on the Bee’s forums wonders where libertarians would fall on the test (ask the commenters at Reason magazine). In fact, one of the problems here might be that political views occupy more than one dimension — they’re just jammed into that in a two-party political system. Are political descriptions (which are local to the U.S.) a proxy for more universal personality traits? Share with social bookmarking: Join the discussion! Name (required) Mail (will not be published) (required) Website