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You probably thought that you’re politically liberal or conservative because your trenchant analysis of the issues has brought you greater wisdom than those on the other side of the political divide.
Wrong.
Your political conviction is the end product of upbringing and experiences that have wired your brain in a particular way, according to a study at the Ohio State University.
Researchers were able to predict—with better than 70-percent accuracy— a person’s political leanings by looking at how the person’s brain works while performing different tasks.
In the experiment, 174 people from ages 18 to 40 and chosen randomly performed eight tasks while their brains were scanned by an MRI machine.
One task examined the person’s capacity for empathy; another required a person to press a button quickly on seeing a particular cue to either win or lose money.
A strong score on the empathy task was correlated with political moderation; doing well on the win-or-lose task indicated political extremism, either liberal or conservative.
The brain patterns of self-identified political conservatives shared consistent brain patterns while performing the tasks; similarly, liberals’ brains showed similar patterns among them that were distinctly different from conservatives’ shared patterns.
The parts of the brain most active during the tasks—and, therefore, perhaps most associated with determining a person’s politics—were the amygdala, where fear and the fight-or-flight response are housed; the hippocampus, where learning and memory reside; and the inferior frontal gyrus, which has a role in focusing attention.
The scans’ results were a better predictor of ideological bent than the politics of a person’s parents, long considered among the most powerful predictor of ideological leanings.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This and similar studies could theoretically bridge the widening political divide if we could learn to see our opposites not as evil or stupid but only as people whose brains have been wired differently by their upbringing and experiences.
That view calls on our sense of empathy, which, as the study found, is a sign of moderation, a place where both sides could meet.
Perhaps a long-term study could determine if training a child to do well on certain tasks would turn them politically conservative or liberal—although a study like that could qualify as child abuse.