The Republican Brain (20 page)

105
middle of the psychological range
Just as they are in the middle of the political range I am indebted to Everett Young for feedback on this section about independents in particular, and for this suggestion.

105
Openness . . . predicts weaker partisan attachment
Alan S. Gerber et al, “Personality and the Strength and Direction of Partisan Identification,” Political Behavior, forthcoming. Available online at
http://huber.research.yale.edu/materials/23_paper.pdf
.

105
more opinion intensity on the right than the left
Pew Research Center, “Beyond Red vs. Blue: The Political Typology,” May 4, 2011. Available online at
http://people-press.org/2011/05/04/beyond-red-vs-blue-the-political-typology/
.

107
George W. Bush's approval ratings consistently went up
Willer, R. (2004). The effects of government-issued terror warnings on presidential approval ratings. Current
Research in Social Psychology
, 10, 1–12.

108
“It is much easier to get a liberal to behave like a conservative than it is to get a conservative to behave like a liberal”
Linda J. Skitka et al, “Dispositions, Scripts, or Motivated Correction? Understanding Ideological Differences in Explanations for Social Problems,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
, 2002, Vol. 83, No. 2, pp. 470–487.

108
drinking alcohol
Eidelman, S., Crandall, C.S., & Goodman, J.A. (2010, July). Disruption of deliberate thinking promotes political conservatism. Paper presented in symposium at the 33
rd
meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology, San Francisco, CA.

109
liberals drink more alcohol
Satoshi Kanazawa and Josephine Hellberg, “Intelligence and Substance Abuse,”
Review of General Psychology
, 2010, Vol. 14, No. 4, 382–396.

109
“for some forms of liberalism, it's a corrective response”
Interview with Scott Eidelman, August 2, 2011.

109
something that already exists rather than something that doesn't
Scott Eidelman et al, “The Existence Bias,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
, 2009, Vol. 97, No. 5, 765–775.

110
“It is not as if we expected ideology to be located in people's elbows”
Interview with John Jost, June 21, 2011.

Chapter Six

Are Conservatives from the Amygdala?

Let's begin with a tale of two brain regions. The first, the amygdala, is an almond-shaped bunch of neurons located in an evolutionarily older part of the brain, the limbic system. Among other functions, the amygdala has been shown to play a key role in our emotional responses to threats and stimuli that evoke fear.

The second region, the anterior cingulated cortex (ACC), is part of the frontal lobe and shares many links to the prefrontal cortex. It has been shown to be involved in detecting mistakes or errors that we make that require a corrective response—what is sometimes called “conflict monitoring.” This process, in turn, seems to be very important in what scientists refer to as “cognitive control”—switching from automatic responses to more measured, System 2 behaviors.

Now get this: A recent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) study of 90 University College of London students found that on average, political conservatives had a larger right amygdala, while political liberals had more gray matter located in the ACC. The students' political beliefs were identified in a fairly standard way: Based on their self-placement on a five point spectrum, which ranged from “very liberal” to “very conservative.” Then the study was repeated in another, smaller group of 28 student subjects. Once again, the finding held.

Before even beginning to tease out the implications of this study—they have probably leapt to mind already—let's pause for a deep breath.

The study was commissioned by the (liberal) British actor Colin Firth, who did not hold back about his intentions. “I took this on as a fairly frivolous exercise,” Firth explained. “I just decided to find out what was biologically wrong with people who don't agree with me and see what scientists had to say about it and they actually came up with something.”

Something, yes. But
what
exactly did they come up with, and prove? We must be careful in interpreting the results of this very new scientific field—often called
neuropolitics
or political neuroscience—where we find relatively few studies so far, and yet at the same time, mounting evidence that liberals and conservatives do indeed tend to have different brains.

Different brains: What does that mean? Probably not what most people think when they hear the phrase. So we need some background here. Asserting that liberal and conservative brains differ is meaningless unless we know how much human brains differ in general, from person to person.

The answer is quite a lot, and not just for reasons rooted in genetics. The brain is highly plastic; in the words of political scientist and neuropolitics researcher Darren Schreiber of the University of California-San Diego, we're “hardwired not to be hardwired.” Each day, we change our brains through new experiences, which form new neural connections. Over a lifetime, then, we all develop different brains.

The brains of musicians, not surprisingly, are highly unique. The brain of someone who has learned to juggle is different from the brain of someone who has not learned to juggle. Surfers have gnarly brains, magicians have tricky brains—and most fascinating, once a person has changed his or her brain by mastering some skill, that brain then responds differently than an unskilled brain when observing someone else perform the activity. That's why magicians can tell what another magician is up to. That's why the magician and skeptic James the Amazing Randi is so adept at detecting frauds and tricksters—and why, before him, so was Harry Houdini.

Given that we can all change our brains by living life in a particular way or learning a new skill, it isn't really too surprising to find that liberals and conservatives have some brain differences. “Being a liberal, and being a conservative, it's almost a lifestyle, so I would be amazed if there aren't differences in the brain that are associated with that,” says Marco Iacoboni, another neuropolitics researcher at the University of California-Los Angeles. Remember those liberal and conservative apartments and bedrooms? Remember conservatives liking order and keeping things on schedule? That's what Iacoboni means by a “lifestyle.”

The real question is thus not whether liberals and conservatives have some brain differences—no big shocker there—but what those differences mean, and how they may influence political behavior and opinions. And here, it would be exceedingly rash to take a single brain imaging study and proclaim that it has forever uncovered the deep electricity behind our ideological divides.

Rather, the true state of political neuroscience is that researchers are finding some consistent results—especially regarding the amygdala and the ACC. But they're also preaching caution. This is science, not phrenology, but there's a lot of uncertainty. Still, the evidence so far is certainly consistent with theoretical expectations that are rooted in psychology.

After all, Colin Firth's study isn't the first to implicate the amygdala in conservatism, or the ACC in liberalism. And based on the research already discussed in the last three chapters, these are the kinds of brain areas where you might
expect
liberals and conservatives to differ—which is precisely why neuropolitics researchers have already homed in on them.

So let's dig into the results further, looking first at conservatives and the amygdala.

In addition to Firth's study, an intriguing bit of research by a team of scientists at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and other institutions found that political conservatives—and more particularly, those whose hold tough-on-crime and pro-military views—have a more pronounced startle reflex, measured by eye-blink strength after hearing a sudden loud noise. Furthermore, when shown threatening images—maggots in an open wound, a large spider on a person's face—these conservatives also showed greater “skin conductance.” Their sweat glands moistened more, making their skin more electrically conductive, an indication of sympathetic nervous system arousal.

These results, of course, are highly consistent with an “amygdala theory” of conservatism. “That's obviously what's in the back of people's minds,” explains University of Nebraska political scientist John Hibbing, one of the study authors. In both tests, conservatives reacted, automatically, as if to defend life and limb from assault. Their ideology was reflected in their
physiology.
Every human being is built for such rapid-fire defensive reactions—we share our fear system with other animals—and liberals of course undergo the same core response. But in conservatives, it appeared to be
stronger.

And still, we're not finished with the evidence on conservatives and the amygdala. Yet another recent brain scan study, this time conducted by the aforementioned Darren Schreiber of the University of California-San Diego and his colleagues, once again documented this connection, through yet another type of neuroscience test.

In this case, study subjects were asked to perform a risky gambling task. As they watched a screen, it flashed three numbers (20, 40, and 80) for one second apiece in ascending order. Pressing a button while one of the numbers was onscreen meant winning the corresponding amount of money, in cents. But there was a risk: While 20 cents was always a gain, sometimes the numbers 40 and 80 flashed red, which meant
losing
40 or 80 cents. Therefore, for each second you held out for more money in the test, you chanced greater rewards, but also greater losses.

Then the researchers simply looked at the study subjects' voting records. Sure enough, Republicans who took a risk in this task (and won) showed much more amygdala activity—a finding that Schreiber interprets to mean that they were sensing a risk coming from outside of them, perhaps physical in nature. Meanwhile, gambling Democrats activated a region of the cortex called the insula, which suggests that they were monitoring
internally
how the risk felt. “It's the difference between feeling your feelings, and reacting to the outside world,” says Schreiber.

All in all, that's a fair bit of evidence connecting conservatism to the amygdala. Psychological theory, of course, also supports the connection: The whole point of the account of conservatism advanced by Jost and his colleagues is that the ideology appeals to the need to manage threat and uncertainty in our lives, with authoritarians presumably being the most strongly characterized by these needs.

So what's the drawback?

There are a few qualifiers, at least. Perhaps the leading criticism of studies that link brain activity in a particular region with traits or behavior is the observation that brain regions do many things, not just one. That seriously complicates the notion of pinning any one trait or behavior on any one brain region or structure. Schreiber points out, for instance, that the amygdala does many things other than respond to threat and fear. “The amygdala also lights up for positive emotions, and lights up just as frequently,” he says.

Nevertheless, the amygdala is
definitely
a fear and threat center, and a central component of our evolutionarily older and emotion-centered brain. It has been called the “heart and soul of the fear system,” processing inputs from different brain regions to structure our life-preserving defensive responses. “If you want to make a really strong association between one emotion and one brain structure, that association between the amygdala and fear holds very well,” says Marco Iacoboni of UCLA. Iacoboni notes that neuroscientists have even been able to study rare cases of bilateral atrophy of the amygdala, and patients with this condition are unable to feel fear, or to recognize it in other people.

And then there are the liberals and the anterior cingulate cortex, or ACC. Its role in the brain is somewhat more complicated, but there is still general scientific consensus that it is involved in error detection and conflict monitoring, and ultimately cognitive control. And Colin Firth's study isn't the first to link it to liberalism.

Consider a 2007 work published in
Nature Neuroscience
, one of the earliest political neuroscience studies. The researchers—John Jost, New York University neuroscientist David Amodio, and several other scientists—hypothesized that liberals have more active ACCs, since after all, they are more flexible and intellectually innovative, and more tolerant of uncertainty. Then they proved as much by having liberals and conservatives perform a classic test for conflict monitoring, of the sort that this brain region is thought to govern.

It's called a “Go-No Go” task: Study subjects are put in a situation where they are required to quickly tap a keyboard when they see “M” on the screen—and become habituated to doing so. But one fifth of the time, the screen instead flashes a “W,” and respondents have to quickly change their behavior and
not
tap the keyboard. Liberals performed better at the task—they were less likely to commit a “Doh!” and tap the keyboard at the wrong time—and they also showed more ACC activity when engaging in the corrective response. (This study was subsequently replicated by another research team, studying a Canadian sample, who also linked more brain firing in the task to egalitarianism, and less firing to right-wing authoritarianism.)

It isn't hard to think of a way to interpret this finding—which, of course, is why the original hypothesis being tested had been generated to begin with. Liberals' greater ACC activity may indicate their greater cognitive flexibility, and their being more willing to update and change their beliefs or responses based on changing cues or situations.

“Conservatives,” the authors concluded, with typical scientific understatement, “would presumably perform better on tasks in which a more fixed response style is optimal.”

Such is the political neuroscience evidence so far—and don't be surprised if more of it rolls in soon. But no matter how much accumulates, or how consistent the results, a central issue will remain. It's the classic “chicken and egg” problem.