Republicans and Democrats Process Risk Differently, Research Finds
A
team of political scientists and neuroscientists has shown that liberals and
conservatives use different parts of the brain when they make risky decisions,
and these regions can be used to predict which political party a person
prefers.
The new study suggests that while genetics or parental influence may
play a significant role, being a Republican or Democrat changes how the brain
functions.
In
a prior experiment, participants had their brain activity measured as they
played a simple gambling game. Dr. Schreiber and his UC San Diego collaborators
were able to look up the political party registration of the participants in
public records. Using this new analysis of 82 people who performed the gambling
task, the academics showed that Republicans and Democrats do not differ in the
risks they take. However, there were striking differences in the participants'
brain activity during the risk-taking task.
Democrats
showed significantly greater activity in the left insula, a region associated
with social and self-awareness. Meanwhile Republicans showed significantly
greater activity in the right amygdala, a region involved in the body's
fight-or-flight system. These results suggest that liberals and conservatives
engage different cognitive processes when they think about risk.
In
fact, brain activity in these two regions alone can be used to predict whether
a person is a Democrat or Republican with 82.9% accuracy. By comparison, the
longstanding traditional model in political science, which uses the party
affiliation of a person's mother and father to predict the child's affiliation,
is only accurate about 69.5% of the time. And another model based on the
differences in brain structure distinguishes liberals from conservatives with
only 71.6% accuracy.
The
model also outperforms models based on differences in genes. Dr. Schreiber
said: "Although genetics have been shown to contribute to differences in
political ideology and strength of party politics, the portion of variation in
political affiliation explained by activity in the amygdala and insula is
significantly larger, suggesting that affiliating with a political party and
engaging in a partisan environment may alter the brain, above and beyond the
effect of heredity."
These
results may pave the way for new research on voter behaviour, yielding better
understanding of the differences in how liberals and conservatives think.
According to Dr. Schreiber: "The ability to accurately predict party
politics using only brain activity while gambling suggests that investigating
basic neural differences between voters may provide us with more powerful
insights than the traditional tools of political science."
Story Source:
The
above story is reprinted from materials provided
by University of Exeter, via EurekAlert!, a
service of AAAS.
Journal Reference:
1. Darren Schreiber, Greg Fonzo, Alan N. Simmons,
Christopher T. Dawes, Taru Flagan, James H. Fowler, Martin P. Paulus. Red
Brain, Blue Brain: Evaluative Processes Differ in Democrats and Republicans. PLoS
ONE, 2013; 8 (2): e52970 DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0052970