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From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: September 10, 2007 11:38:18 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Subject: Right (Wing) Brain, Left (Wing) Brain
Study finds left-wing brain, right-wing brain
Even in humdrum nonpolitical decisions,
liberals and conservatives literally think differently,
researchers show.
By Denise Gellene
Los Angeles Times, September 10, 2007
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/politics/la-sci-
politics10sep10,0,1504273.story
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.
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."
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.
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."
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