Neuroscience Looks at Liberals and Conservatives

You might have already seen this article in the LA Times, or heard about it, looking at EEGs and behaviors of liberals and conservatives. First, an opinion. Scientists studying the way we think sometimes discuss it in terms of "the mind" and sometimes in terms of "the brain," as if these were interchangeable. Sometimes this is valid, but sometimes we act as though brain-explanations are equivalent to mind-explanations; this is an instance of something called the mereological fallacy. Brains don't think, for instance, minds think. This is an important distinction in my research, and I am sorry when I see cognitive neuroscientists or the journalists who report on them make that kind of error. Mind is a quality that emerges when a human brain is nurtured in a mindful social context, let's say; minds need more than a brain, minds need other people.

But still, there are times when it is interesting to see how an effect plays out in the correlation between brain activity and thought, and this might be an example of that.

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. Study finds left-wing brain, right-wing brain

So the background: liberal and conservative minds differ, conservatives like to stick with the familiar ways of doing things and liberals like to try something new sometimes. Pretty much sums it up.

But is it "because of how their brains work?" Or do their brains work that way because of how they have learned to think?

And that last sentence is ... just wrong, comparing the generalization of a learned association to an unconditioned reflex.

More...

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."

There are two kinds of data here: the rate of correct responses and EEG of this particular part of the brain. Liberals responded better when the unexpected stimulus was shown, and their brainwaves correspondingly showed activity in the part that computes whether a habitual response is inappropriate.

You see that this can be interpreted in two ways. Liberals and conservatives behave differently, okay, that's interesting but not especially surprising. Liberals' and conservatives' brains function differently -- okay, given that they behave differently, you'd expect that, wouldn't you?

It's not like they've proven that liberals' brains are inherently different from conservatives' brains. You can't tell if this is a learned pattern or an inherited one, for instance. So let's not use this to argue that our side and the other side are "just different" from one another.

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.

But look, the EEG data don't affect these conclusions at all. All you needed to know was the error rates with the presentation of the less-familiar stimulus.

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."

See what I mean? Even the author of the study thinks that because their brains react differently, they might never see eye-to-eye. Maybe he knows something beyond what is carried in this newspaper story, but the study as reported does not give any evidence that this is an innate difference, shall we say, versus a learned one. Brains change as people learn stuff, that's no secret. I think it is dangerous and gullible to assign greater causal weight to the physiological process than to the social ones, to act as if "the brain" is making decisions that "the person" is responsible for. And I think our more conservative readers will want to agree with that view, as well.

The brain activity doesn't have anything to do with any of these conclusions, except maybe to show what brain processes correlate with what kind of decision-making. Some people adapt better to unusual situations, some people seek out new experiences, some people look at what's in front of them before they make a decision, and some don't, or some do it more than others. We expect brain activity to reflect thinking, and vice versa -- the brain is obviously a physical mechanism that supports thinking. This difference in how we respond to unusual circumstances may turn out to be an important, fundamental dichotomy across human beings, hard-wired, as they say, before birth, or it may turn out to be one of a gazillion individual differences that arise as people are enculturated, as they learn how to respond to the world from their parents, teachers, friends.

I think it really is interesting that self-identified liberals and conservatives respond differently like this. They do about the same when the "familiar" letter is shown, but when a different letter is shown, the liberals notice the difference and the conservatives respond as if the familiar one had been seen. It's a kind of neat experiment to show what is actually probably an important difference between "us" and "them," and a constant source of frustration for the difference-noticers.