Posted on 02/13/2013 5:27:09 PM PST by neverdem
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.
Dr. Darren Schreiber, a researcher in neuropolitics at the University of Exeter, has been working in collaboration with colleagues at the University of California, San Diego on research that explores the differences in the way the brain functions in American liberals and conservatives. The findings are published Feb. 13 in the journal PLOS ONE.
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...
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencedaily.com ...
This is what I like about ScienceDaily. About 9 out of 10 times, they link the original citation, IMHO.
Hopefully this can lead to a cure for liberalism!
Just $1 a day can stop this disease! Donate today!
I am surprised that they they did not conclude that democrats use “higher” reasoning areas of the brain.
It seems in these studies there is always some slant that attempts to make demonrats look smarter
The red brain says I will take this risk and be responsible for it.
The blue brain picks its nose and eats it.
My experience in life directly contradicts theses findings.
Most liberals I know are illogical and base their decisions largely on emotion — supposedly an attribute of the right side of the brain.
Liberals use the area of the brain used for emotions and feelings .... Conservatives use the part of the brain used in logic,, analysis and objectivity. Yup ... it actually makes sense.
I read the study, and this is the money quote that confirms my observations, liberals are fundamentally insecure.
snip
The insula and amygdala often function together in processing situations of risk and uncertainty [30]. The amygdala plays a critical role in orienting of attention to external cues [31] and fear conditioning [32]; however, this structure is also important for other emotional information processing and behavior [33]. Functional neuroimaging studies have shown amygdala activation in reward related processing [34], encoding of emotionally salient information [35], risk-taking [36], processing positively-valenced stimuli [37], and appetitive/aversive olfactory learning [38]. In comparison, neuroimaging studies of insular cortex have observed critical involvement of this neural structure in pain [39], interoceptive [40], emotion-related [41], cognitive [42], and social processing [43]. In particular, the insular cortex is important for representation of internal bodily cues crucial for subjective feeling states and interoceptive awareness [40], [44]. That differences in the processing of risk and uncertainty differentiate liberals and conservatives suggests an alternative way of conceptualizing ideology.
There are two types of liberals, the masters and the slaves. While your statement is true of the rank and file parasite liberal, make no mistake that the leftist elites are extremely calculating. They have to be in order to control there lesseres in the political machine. Think about this, if you wanted to become rich and powerful but didn’t have the drive or ability to produce something that would make you wealthy, what more logical, brilliant, and evil way could you get it than becoming a bigwig in the rat party.
Yeah, the rank and file are quite stupid, but the leaders of their kind are very devious — just think Clinton, Obama, and their Sith overlord George Soros.
“Socialize the risk; privatize the reward.” — every liberal ever.
“To those who take the risk should go the reward.” — conservatives.
That's exactly what I thought when I saw the headline. How are they going to spin this in favor of libs?
Actually, I think that is exactly what the study says; Liberal risk taking is based on “social and self-awareness;” Conservative risk taking is based on “fight or flight.”
I think a somewhat logical interpretation is to say that Democrat risk taking is based on emotion (”How will it make me feel?”) and Republicans are based on cost/benefit analysis (”What is at stake?”).
That's exactly what I thought when I saw the headline. How are they going to spin this in favor of libs?
When Red brains process risk, they are processing risck to their own money. When Blue brains process risk, they are calculating risk on other people’s money.
Speaking as a woman working in the field of math/science... of which most of my peers are men....
They might have something there
Signed a staunch unwavering conservative tea partier
did I mention i love my God my bible and my gun.
uh huh, yeah, that’s the ticket, the liberals are “socially aware” and the conservatives “fight or flight” like a neanderthal beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee essssssssssssssss
This is exactly why they are low information voters and always will be. The only way to get the dems to vote conservative is to use the EMO card. Talking to them logically will not compute.
Also, the liberals are expert social psychologists using EMO to get the sheep to do as they want. Hence, using every catastrophe to play on the emotions of the sheep. Lying is great because the sheep are using emotions and not brains and will not remember what was said by only how they felt about what was said.
I’ve found that liberals take risks with an assumption that mommy and daddy (government) will save them from any mistake.
Assuming most conservatives are like me - I worry about any risk in terms of if there’s an outcome where I end up homeless.
My Dad actually told me that a looooooong time ago. Most people respond emotionally and that most arguments should be couched that way. Logical, fact based argument only work with relatively small parts of the population.
I have never been able to implement it, though, so I work with computers and other geeks.
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