Left-wing brain, right-wing brain

September 10, 2007

It’s probably occurred to all of us that people on the left and right seem to think differently, but it’s nice to get clinical proof once in a while.

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 today in 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.

This sounds fairly predictable, but interesting anyway. I’d always thought “liberal,” by definition, meant to be more tolerant of change and new information, but this experiment quantified this a bit.

Here’s how it worked: college students, whose politics ranged from “very liberal” to “very conservative,” were tested on their ability to recognize a change in stimulus. While sitting in front of a monitor, study participants were shown either an M or a W. When an M appeared on screen, the participants were instructed to tap a keyboard. When a W appeared, they were supposed to do nothing.

M appeared four times more frequently, so the college students got into a habit of tapping the keyboard in a “knee-jerk fashion.”

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.

More specifically, liberals were more than twice as likely to correctly identify the changes on the monitor, and on electrical measurements of the brain area that monitored the conflict “between a habitual tendency … and a more appropriate response,” liberals were five times more likely to show brain activity.

And just in case the letters mattered, researchers tried it again with lots of Ws and fewer Ms, and the results were the same.

It’s tempting to think liberals are better able to appreciate nuances, details, and complexities, isn’t it?

Nah, it just means right-wingers are brain dead. But we knew that already. 🙂

  • Now we know for sure they’re the rock-heads we’ve always known they were and why they are so thoroughly fifth-rate in their accomplishments. Thank God I have none of them in my friendship circles anymore.

  • There is problem with being too flexible and getting caught in a loop of indecision, but otherwise, it is no surprise here.

    Many of us commenters have been saying this for quite some time.

    Look at the Wah on Terrah. To be successful requires the ability to deal with nuances, details and complexities. Cons haven’t been fairing so well.

  • “Conservatives” can’t readily adapt to changing stimuli. What a shock.

    Probably the researchers were too polite to call them what they are: morons.

  • I’d like to know what the researchers classified as “conservative”. I’ve known many old-style conservatives — Republicans like SF Mayor George Christopher, or Cap Weinberger (CA attorney general, later Reagan’s defense secty) — who were more balanced and rational than the mostly fanatical Democrats I knew at the time (who were only interested in keeping the Blacks out of the Mission District).

    Today’s conservatives — primarily neofascists, racists and religious extremists — should be compared with liberals at all. They should be sent for psychiatric analysis and evaluation, with therapy thrown in for those who honestly want to return to society.

    I think most Democrats have to face and find a way to integrate conflicting realities — personal religious skepticism with appreciation for the feelings of believers, ambition for economic advancement with compassion for those less fortunate, support for a sufficient military while working hard for peace, wanting abortion to be safe, legal and rare. Republicans, on the hand, seem to be intolerant, monomaniacal fanatics.

  • It’s true that if conservatives expect to see an ‘M’, they see the letter ‘M’, even when you show them a ‘W’. But what I found even more interesting is that if you show them a blank page, they see a ‘WMD’.

  • This is why conservatives are such formidable spokespeople: they can repeat blatant lies that go against all evidence without even flinching.

  • Too bad we can’t run the same test on famous dictators and mass murderers in history.
    I got a hunch what the results would show…

    Slightly Deeper:

    Does not this explain why college professors tend to be overwhelmingly liberal?
    No dummies: It is not a communist plot to destroy America…
    They got their PhD’s because they can handle the complexity horizon better.

    Much Deeper:

    Neuro-economics (economic game theory) tells us that humans divide often themselves into three fundamental patterns of behavior. I suspect this is natural selection’s way of preserving the species given various calamities.

    Along these lines I’ve often pondered the genetic role that conservatives play in times of stress. Their knee-jerk tribal minds are obviously well-suited to 9/11 attacks. On the other hand: Global warming is beyond their complexity horizon. In fact, they consider it a liberal communist plot. They simply can’t envision the future…

    The real question that needs to be asked of the grown-ups in charge is this:

    At what point do we consider the republican brain to be a overwhelming liability to the future of the race?

    Personally?
    I think we are already there.
    These people are a liability and a hinderance to humanity.
    They may have once helped us slay and rape the Neandertals, and if you accept their myths, tame the dinosaurs, but their use now to humanity is simply used up. They are a drag on the future of the race…

    [Note to David Brooks: Are you lurking at the bottom of this thread?
    If so: Yes, I really do think you and your ilk are inferior forms of humans.
    And yes: Your use of Osama bin Laden’s tape as a club to beat on liberals informs my opinion. That really does show you as a primarily-evil primeval.
    (Insert famous Cheny quote here). ]

  • When a W appeared, they were supposed to do nothing.

    Just like W himself…

    And now they have a way to scientifically identify liberals which they will use when the time comes to have them all rounded up and thrown into ‘re-education’ camps.

  • CB, in another posting (When the rhetoric goes over the top) you said:

    “Stoller makes a compelling case that this stems from some odd fascination with GOP “Daddy” figures.”

    and you found it odd. It’s not odd at all; they’re hard-wired that way. Though I must say that I know quite a few “moderate” (aka centrist) Dems who also seem to be prone to taking the “habitual” route in their thinking instead of constantly adjusting as reality changes, and who tend to accept “authority” without much critical thinking. It’s easier…

    That’s not to say that, over the past 7 years, I haven’t developed my own “knee-jerk reaction”; everything I hear and/or read, I check for the source’s “alignment”. If it’s “informed” by, say AEI or Heritage Foundation, I automatically discount all of it, which, probably, is not very smart, either.

  • I don’t think the mechanism described in the study really has to do with being “reflexively” partisan except in the right-wingers case. That’s why I think people may be having trouble getting their heads around this- they see the description of reflexivel adhering to one’s views, and it reminds them of some liberals they know. That is not the point. The point is, you wouldn’t grow to accept advance-guard and non-traditional, non-conformist points of view in the first place if you didn’t have the liberal orientation. And being a liberal requires changing over and over again, while being a conservative does not (except, in the sense of being dishonest to advocate for your views, which is not the same thing). When new evidence comes to the liberal that something else is bad, liberals require of themselves the ability to change themselves to accept the new realization.

    I had liberal moments agains and again in my life, when I want vegetarian, for example, or revised my stance on vegetarianism and animal rights. A conservative’s process is more akin to just thinking how to best pursue implementation of the original belief (or how to just keep harping on it). If it helps them, it’s by keeping them more focused on the necessity (to their own set of beliefs) of working to achieve something politically, instead of just talking about their beliefs and their ideal preferences and what they like and don’t like.

  • Someone who’s more ideologically nimble is more liberal. Somebody who’s more dogmatic is more conservative. My ability to change my mind, without anyone’s prompting, about details of my beliefs on animal rights, marks me as a dyed-in-the-wool liberal.

  • I was just about to say that I can think of people on the left who seem to run in pretty ruts. Frankly, I think we all have blind spots that we are unable or unwilling to see beyond.

  • “liberals were five times more likely to show brain activity.” You could have had your headline there and left it at that. 🙂

  • It means you conservatives are as slow as a rock and unwilling to be sensitive.. to say… gays… other religions… minorities.. i mean really I can go on…

    case in point? You conservatives are bunch of assholes. =)

  • Long-story short, don’t chalk up every instance of decisiveness or every decision to keep your jury out and investigate something more to your orientation as a liberal or a conservative– a lot of other factors come into play in making a particular decision. And I can think of contexts in which I’ve trained myself to accepts certain amounts or types of evidence as probably sufficient and/or conclusive, and further investigation a waste of time, and other contexts in which I’ve trained myself to be more investigatory and curious and not so quick to rush to judgment. It’s called growing up and becoming less naive, more wise.

  • Please forgive my repeat, this seems more appropriate to this discussion than yesterdays.

    Conceptual Traps

    Lumping together a large group of people and attributing one or two reasons for their actions is falling into the same trap as the right wing loonies. Having said that I do think that many of us in America are caught in a reality that has crippled our ability to see and think “outside the box, or country to be more specific). None of us prescribe to all the ideas that follow but all of us have heard them since we were children and they have enough in common to have become a sort of a mythic base for many of our collective opinions.

    We, (the good guys), won the second world war because we were fighting on the side of all the ideals that our enlightened Western Society have distilled from the wisdom of all those who have come before us. We are still the good guys.

    We won because we were able to use the resources of the countries and people, who chose our ideas over the ideas of our enemies. Thus we are entitled to continue this practice forever.

    The very material and intellectual richness that most of us have experienced since we were children proves that our way is the best and perhaps the only way to live.

    The United States is the best place to live in at this time because a person has a better chance to, “be who they want to be”, here.

    Since so many people from all over the world want to come here to “better their lives”, we are entitled to export our way of life to other countries for their own good, in the long run.

    We need the resources from the rest of the world to continue our way of life. This is a reality.

    We want our lives and the lives of our children to become better and better.

    Our freedom to speak and to produce ideas is sacred to us as a people and if this means that if our largest “intellectual”, export to the rest of the world and the Middle East in particular is pornography that is the fault of their society not ours. Our society should not be judged by actions and ideas that to some are the worst examples of our behavior as humans.

    We do crave excitement and this means our games are pretty violent, this is just part of our culture of freedom to push ourselves to the limit.

    We are too busy dealing with the problems of pursuing this kind life to want anything but simple solutions to other peoples problems if we even consider their problems.

    Each of us chooses small pieces out of the vast array of our myths, a belief system that we can live with most comfortably.
    Last year I heard a man who professed to me that he was a Christian declare, “the Iraq war is about oil and religion and 2000 casualties out of our population of over 200 million is a small price to pay, considering the stakes”.
    Please pardon the length, I got carried away with my free speech.
    David Chisholm

  • Chisolm wrote:

    Lumping together a large group of people and attributing one or two reasons for their actions is falling into the same trap as the right wing loonies.

    Well, this isn’t a conseptual trap, it’s an empirical study done on people who self-identify as liberal or conservative, and it’s got to be no coincidence that huge numbers of people basically sort themselves into having the same opinions on issues so that there are only two basic political orientations, rather than each individual’s personal ideology seeming more random.

  • I think there are probably a few self-identified liberals who have the asshole gene, and who through circumstances in their life, decide to adopt liberal ideas as a subterfuge to gain social acceptance, etc. Just a guess- you would find them with a large enough sample size, but since the study was small, and that type of individual is rare, I doubt they had outliers such as that in the study. There are a multitude of unique individuals out there, you know.

  • I didn’t have time to read all the comments here yet; I’ll go back to them after I post this.

    I liked the article, in regards to this research, in our local newspaper better: It was a reprint with permission from the Chicago Tribune (Judy Peres)

    Why did I like it better? Here are a few gems from it.

    …A review of the research publishid in 2003 found that conservatives tend to be more rigid and closed-minded, less tolerant of ambiguity and less open to new experiences.

    Some of the traits associated with right-wingers in that review were decidedly unflattering, including fear,agression, tolerance of inequality, and lack of complexity in thinking.

    John Jost, and author of both the review and the current study, was prompted to defend the research in an op-ed piece published in the Washington Post. (After being visiouscly being attacked by the right wingers)

    Hopefully Steve will elaborate some more on this study: it certainly explains a lot, now that we know that conservatives are less sensitive in their anterior cingulate cortex.

    🙂

  • I have heard from sources who have seen the study that it’s complete nonsense. Apparently, “Conservative” means “more Conservative than the average college student”. That is, all students, including middle-of-the-road students with no strong views at all, where classified as either Conservative or Liberal.

    Since the sample group was overwhelmingly Liberal, this means the Conservative group contained more people with no strong Liberal or Conservative views (thus more Conservative than average!) than bona fide Conservatives. As a result, everything it says about “Conservatives” is really more likely to be about people with no strong views.

    People with equally strong views scored about the same.

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