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

To: Snowshoe who wrote (223256)	10/10/2007 11:39:53 AM
From: koan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793587

RED BRAIN, BLUE BRAIN: 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