Red brain, blue brain: evaluative processes differ in Democrats and Republicans

Afraid of whom?: Threat sensitivity's influence changes with perceived source of threat

Taking insights from the fields of psychology and biology, a growing body of scholarship considers the psychophysiological foundations of political attitudes. Subconscious emotional reactions to threat, for example, have been shown to predict socially conservative attitudes toward out-groups. However, many of these studies fail to consider different sources of perceived threat. Using a combination of survey and physiological data, I distinguish between fear of others and fear of authority, finding that threat sensitivity predicts divergent political attitudes depending on the strength of each. Those who are more sensitive to threat from others tend to hold socially conservative attitudes, while those who fear authority generally take more libertarian positions. As sensitivity to threat is at least partially inherited, these findings highlight the genetic role of political predispositions.

Deeper Than You Think: Partisanship-Dependent Brain Responses in Early Sensory and Motor Brain Regions

Recent political polarization has illustrated how individuals with opposing political views often experience ongoing events in markedly different ways. In this study, we explored the neural mechanisms underpinning this phenomenon. We conducted fMRI scanning of 34 right- and left-wing participants (45% females) watching political videos (e.g., campaign ads and political speeches) just before the elections in Israel. As expected, we observed significant differences between left- and right-wing participants in their interpretation of the videos' content. Furthermore, neuroimaging results revealed partisanship-dependent differences in activation and synchronization in higher-order regions. Surprisingly, such differences were also revealed in early sensory, motor, and somatosensory regions. We found that the political content synchronized the responses of primary visual and auditory cortices in a partisanship-dependent manner. Moreover, right-wing (and not left-wing) individuals' sensorimotor cortex was involved in processing right-wing (and not left-wing) political content. These differences were pronounced to the extent that we could predict political orientation from the early brain-response alone. Importantly, no such differences were found with respect to neutral content. Therefore, these results uncover more fundamental neural mechanisms underlying processes of political polarization.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT The political sphere has become highly polarized in recent years. Would it be possible to identify the neural mechanisms underpinning such processes? In our study, left- and right-wing participants were scanned in fMRI while watching political video clips just before the elections in Israel. We found that political content was potent in synchronizing the brain responses of individuals holding similar views. This was far more pronounced in individuals holding right-wing views. Moreover, partisan-dependent differences in neural responses were identified already in early sensory, somatosensory, and motor regions, and only for political content. These results suggest that individuals' political views shape their neural responses at a very basic level.

Do liberals value emotion more than conservatives? Political partisanship and Lay beliefs about the functionality of emotion

Relying on feelings to guide thoughts and plans may be functional from the perspective of the individual but threaten the cohesion of social groups. Thus, liberals, who prioritize caring and fairness for individuals, may view emotion as more functional than do conservatives, who prioritize preserving social groups, hierarchies, and institutions. To test this, participants in three studies (total N = 1,355) rated political partisanship, beliefs about the functionality of emotion, and well-being. Study 3 also assessed how much participants prioritized “individualizing” versus “socially binding” values (Graham et al., 2011). Across all studies, the more liberal participants were, the more they viewed emotion as functional, despite reporting less emotional well-being. In Study 3, the link between liberalism and valuing emotion was mediated by more liberal participants’ greater endorsement of individualizing than socially binding values. These results suggest that emotion is viewed as more functional by those who prioritize the needs of individuals, but as less functional by those who prioritize the cohesion of social groups.

Functional connectivity signatures of political ideology

Emerging research has begun investigating the neural underpinnings of the biological and psychological differences that drive political ideology, attitudes, and actions. Here, we explore the neurological roots of politics through conducting a large sample, whole-brain analysis of functional connectivity (FC) across common fMRI tasks. Using convolutional neural networks, we develop predictive models of ideology using FC from fMRI scans for nine standard task-based settings in a novel cohort of healthy adults (n = 174, age range: 18 to 40, mean = 21.43) from the Ohio State University Wellbeing Project. Our analyses suggest that liberals and conservatives have noticeable and discriminative differences in FC that can be identified with high accuracy using contemporary artificial intelligence methods and that such analyses complement contemporary models relying on socio-economic and survey-based responses. FC signatures from retrieval, empathy, and monetary reward tasks are identified as important and powerful predictors of conservatism, and activations of the amygdala, inferior frontal gyrus, and hippocampus are most strongly associated with political affiliation. Although the direction of causality is unclear, this study suggests that the biological and neurological roots of political behavior run much deeper than previously thought.

A Psychology of Ideology: Unpacking the Psychological Structure of Ideological Thinking

The psychological study of ideology has traditionally emphasized the content of ideological beliefs, guided by questions about what people believe, such as why people believe in omniscient gods or fascist worldviews. This theoretical focus has led to siloed subdisciplines separately dealing with political, religious, moral, and prejudiced attitudes. The fractionation has fostered a neglect of the cognitive structure of ideological worldviews and associated questions about why ideologies—in all their forms—are so compelling to the human mind. Here I argue that it is essential to consider the nature of ideological cognition across a multitude of ideologies. I offer a multidimensional, empirically tractable framework of ideological thinking, suggesting it can be conceptualized as a style of thinking that is rigid in its adherence to a doctrine and resistance to evidence-based belief-updating and favorably oriented toward an in-group and antagonistic to out-groups. The article identifies the subcomponents of ideological thinking and highlights that ideological thinking constitutes a meaningful psychological phenomenon that merits direct scholarly investigation and analysis. By emphasizing conceptual precision, methodological directions, and interdisciplinary integration across the political and cognitive sciences, the article illustrates the potential of this framework as a catalyst for developing a rigorous domain-general psychology of ideology.

International data governance for neuroscience

As neuroscience projects increase in scale and cross international borders, different ethical principles, national and international laws, regulations, and policies for data sharing must be considered. These concerns are part of what is collectively called data governance. Whereas neuroscience data transcend borders, data governance is typically constrained within geopolitical boundaries. An international data governance framework and accompanying infrastructure can assist investigators, institutions, data repositories, and funders with navigating disparate policies. Here, we propose principles and operational considerations for how data governance in neuroscience can be navigated at an international scale and highlight gaps, challenges, and opportunities in a global brain data ecosystem. We consider how to approach data governance in a way that balances data protection requirements and the need for open science, so as to promote international collaboration through federated constructs such as the International Brain Initiative (IBI).

Is negativity bias intuitive for liberals and conservatives?

Previous research suggests that conservatives (right-wingers) tend to show more negativity bias than liberals (left-wingers) in several tasks. However, the majority of these studies are based on correlational findings and do not provide information on the cognitive underpinnings of this tendency. The current research investigated whether intuition promotes negativity bias and mitigates the ideological asymmetry in this domain in three underrepresented, non-western samples (Turkey). In line with the previous literature, we defined negativity bias as the tendency to interpret ambiguous faces as threatening. The results of the lab experiment revealed that negativity bias increases under high-cognitive load overall. In addition, this effect was moderated by the participants' political orientation (Experiment 1). In other words, when their cognitive resources were depleted, liberals became more like conservatives in terms of negativity bias. However, we failed to conceptually replicate this effect using time-limit manipulations in two online preregistered experiments during the COVID-19 pandemic, where the baseline negativity bias is thought to be already at peak. Thus, the findings provide no strong evidence for the idea that intuition promotes negativity bias and that liberals use cognitive effort to avoid this perceptual bias.

Political taste: Exploring how perception of bitter substances may reveal risk tolerance and political preferences

Risk is endemic to the political arena and influences citizen engagement. We explore this connection by suggesting that risk-taking may be biologically instantiated in sensory systems. With specific attention to gender and gender identity, we investigate the connections between self-reported bitter taste reception, risk tolerance, and both of their associations with political participation. In three U.S. samples collected in 2019 and 2020, participants were asked to rate their preferences from lists of foods as well as whether they detected the taste of the substance N-Propylthiouracil (PROP) and, if so, the strength of the taste. In this registered report, we find that self-reported bitter taste preference, but not PROP detection, is positively associated with higher levels of risk tolerance as well as political participation. The pattern with gender and gender identity is mixed across our samples, but interestingly, we find that sex-atypical gender identity positively predicts political participation.

A neurocognitive model of ideological thinking

Ideological behavior has traditionally been viewed as a product of social forces. Nonetheless, an emerging science suggests that ideological worldviews can also be understood in terms of neural and cognitive principles. The article proposes a neurocognitive model of ideological thinking, arguing that ideological worldviews may be manifestations of individuals' perceptual and cognitive systems. This model makes two claims. First, there are neurocognitive antecedents to ideological thinking: the brain's low-level neurocognitive dispositions influence its receptivity to ideological doctrines. Second, there are neurocognitive consequences to ideological engagement: strong exposure and adherence to ideological doctrines can shape perceptual and cognitive systems. This article details the neurocognitive model of ideological thinking and synthesizes the empirical evidence in support of its claims. The model postulates that there are bidirectional processes between the brain and the ideological environment, and so it can address the roles of situational and motivational factors in ideologically motivated action. This endeavor highlights that an interdisciplinary neurocognitive approach to ideologies can facilitate biologically informed accounts of the ideological brain and thus reveal who is most susceptible to extreme and authoritarian ideologies. By investigating the relationships between low-level perceptual processes and high-level ideological attitudes, we can develop a better grasp of our collective history as well as the mechanisms that may structure our political futures.

Measuring attitudes as a complex system: Structured thinking and support for the Canadian carbon tax

We test a method for applying a network-based approach to the study of political attitudes. We use cognitive-affective mapping, an approach that visually represents attitudes as networks of concepts that an individual associates with a given issue. Using a software tool called Valence, we asked a sample of Canadians (n = 111) to draw a cognitive-affective map (CAM) of their views on the carbon tax. We treat these networks as a series of undirected graphs and examine the extent to which support for the tax can be predicted based on each graph's emotional and structural properties. We find evidence that the emotional but not the structural properties significantly predict individuals' attitudes toward the carbon tax. We also find associations between CAMs' structural properties (density and centrality) and several measures of political interest. Our results provide preliminary evidence for the efficacy of CAMs as a tool for studying political attitudes. The study data are available at https://osf.io/qwpvd/?view_only=6834a1c442224e72bf45e7641880a17f.

Psychophysiology, cognition, and political differences: Guest editors' introduction to the special issue

We introduce the Politics and the Life Sciences special issue on Psychophysiology, Cognition, and Political Differences. This issue represents the second special issue funded by the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences that adheres to the Open Science Framework for registered reports (RR). Here pre-analysis plans (PAPs) are peer-reviewed and given in-principle acceptance (IPA) prior to data being collected and/or analyzed, and are published contingent upon the preregistration of the study being followed as proposed. Bound by a common theme of the importance of incorporating psychophysiological perspectives into the study of politics, broadly defined, the articles in this special issue feature a unique set of research questions and methodologies. In the following, we summarize the findings, discuss the innovations produced by this research, and highlight the importance of open science for the future of political science research.

Early EEG responses to pre-electoral survey items reflect political attitudes and predict voting behavior

Self-reports are conventionally used to measure political preferences, yet individuals may be unable or unwilling to report their political attitudes. Here, in 69 participants we compared implicit and explicit methods of political attitude assessment and focused our investigation on populist attitudes. Ahead of the 2019 European Parliament election, we recorded electroencephalography (EEG) from future voters while they completed a survey that measured levels of agreement on different political issues. An Implicit Association Test (IAT) was administered at the end of the recording session. Neural signals differed as a function of future vote for a populist or mainstream party and of whether survey items expressed populist or non-populist views. The combination of EEG responses and self-reported preferences predicted electoral choice better than traditional socio-demographic and ideological variables, while IAT scores were not a significant predictor. These findings suggest that measurements of brain activity can refine the assessment of socio-political attitudes, even when those attitudes are not based on traditional ideological divides.

Intolerance of uncertainty modulates brain-to-brain synchrony during politically polarized perception

Political partisans see the world through an ideologically biased lens. What drives political polarization? Although it has been posited that polarization arises because of an inability to tolerate uncertainty and a need to hold predictable beliefs about the world, evidence for this hypothesis remains elusive. We examined the relationship between uncertainty tolerance and political polarization using a combination of brain-to-brain synchrony and intersubject representational similarity analysis, which measured committed liberals' and conservatives' (n = 44) subjective interpretation of naturalistic political video material. Shared ideology between participants increased neural synchrony throughout the brain during a polarizing political debate filled with provocative language but not during a neutrally worded news clip on polarized topics or a nonpolitical documentary. During the political debate, neural synchrony in mentalizing and valuation networks was modulated by one's aversion to uncertainty: Uncertainty-intolerant individuals experienced greater brain-to-brain synchrony with politically like-minded peers and lower synchrony with political opponents-an effect observed for liberals and conservatives alike. Moreover, the greater the neural synchrony between committed partisans, the more likely that two individuals formed similar, polarized attitudes about the debate. These results suggest that uncertainty attitudes gate the shared neural processing of political narratives, thereby fueling polarized attitude formation about hot-button issues.

The neural basis of ideological differences in race categorization

Multiracial individuals are often categorized as members of their 'socially subordinate' racial group-a form of social discrimination termed hypodescent-with political conservatives more likely than liberals to show this bias. Although hypodescent has been linked to racial hierarchy preservation motives, it remains unclear how political ideology influences categorization: Do conservatives and liberals see, feel or think about mixed-race faces differently? Do they differ in sensitivity to Black prototypicality (i.e. skin tone darkness and Afrocentric features) or racial ambiguity (i.e. categorization difficulty) of Black/White mixed-race faces? To help answer these questions, we collected a politically diverse sample of White participants and had them categorize mixed-race faces as Black or White during functional neuroimaging. We found that conservatism was related to greater anterior insula activity to racially ambiguous faces, and this pattern of brain activation mediated conservatives' use of hypodescent. This demonstrates that conservatives' greater sensitivity to racial ambiguity (rather than Black prototypicality) gives rise to greater categorization of mixed-race individuals into the socially subordinate group and tentatively suggests that conservatives may differ from liberals in their affective reactions to mixed-race faces. Implications for the study of race categorization and political psychology are discussed. This article is part of the theme issue 'The political brain: neurocognitive and computational mechanisms'.

Toward a neuropsychology of political orientation: exploring ideology in patients with frontal and midbrain lesions

How do people form their political beliefs? In an effort to address this question, we adopt a neuropsychological approach. In a natural experiment, we explored links between neuroanatomy and ideological preferences in two samples of brain lesion patients in New York City. Specifically, we compared the political orientations of patients with frontal lobe lesions, patients with amygdala lesions and healthy control subjects. Lesion type classification analyses revealed that people with frontal lesions held more conservative (or less liberal) beliefs than those with anterior temporal lobe lesions or no lesions. Additional analyses predicting ideology by extent of damage provided convergent evidence that greater damage in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex-but not the amygdala-was associated with greater conservatism. These findings were robust to model specifications that adjusted for demographic, mood, and affect-related variables. Although measures of executive function failed to mediate the relationship between frontal lesions and ideology, our findings suggest that the prefrontal cortex may play a role in promoting the development of liberal ideology. Our approach suggests useful directions for future work to address the issue of whether biological developments precede political attitudes or vice versa-or both. This article is part of the theme issue 'The political brain: neurocognitive and computational mechanisms'.

Neural Predictors of Changes in Party Closeness after Exposure to Corruption Messages: An fMRI Study

Daily worldwide newspapers are filled with campaigning unveiling political corruption. Despite this information be worrying to many citizens, political researchers have not identified any consistent trend of decline of support among party sympathizers. This study utilizes neuroimaging for the first time to examine the neuropsychological origin of party closeness variation among backers of a liberal (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, PSOE) and a conservative party (Popular Party, PP) in Spain after a month receiving corruption messages among their preferred party. Brain data provide some explanation as to the origin of party closeness reduction among liberal sympathizers: areas involved with negative feelings, disappointment and self-relevance served to predict party closeness reduction 30 days in advance. Implications for liberals and conservatives’ campaigns are discussed.

Cognition and Political Ideology in Aging

OBJECTIVE

The impact of cognitive function and decline on political ideology is unknown. We studied the relationship between cognition and both political orientation and political policy choices in a population of older persons.

DESIGN

Longitudinal investigation.

SETTING

A retirement community and its surroundings in Southern California.

PARTICIPANTS

151 members of a longitudinal investigation of aging and dementia in the oldest-old (the 90+ Study), mean age 95 years.

MEASUREMENTS

Participants self-reported their political ideology (7-point scale from extremely liberal to extremely conservative) and policy preferences for federal spending on public schooling, aid to the poor, and protecting the environment, as well as on preferences on immigration rates, death penalty, and university admission. The same political survey was mailed to participants twice: at time one and 6-months later. Cognitive function based on neurological examination and cognitive testing was classified as normal (55%), cognitive impairment/not dementia (CIND) (33%), or dementia (12%). We calculated rank correlations between ideology and policy choices, stratified by cognitive status, and agreement between Surveys 1 and 2.

RESULTS

Political ideology/orientation was highly consistent over a six-month period (84% agreement) among the 122 who returned the second survey, with no significant relationship to cognitive status. Among cognitively impaired (CIND and dementia), however, there was significant loss of consistency between an individual's political orientation and their policy choices. Level of political engagement was high for participants, with more than 90% voting in the 2016 presidential election.

CONCLUSION

In this population of older persons, political identification on the liberal-conservative spectrum was resilient despite cognitive decline, but its meaning and function were changed. For the cognitively impaired it remained a self-defining label, but no longer operated as a higher order framework for orienting specific policy preferences. There appeared to be loss of coherence between the political orientation and political policy choices of cognitively impaired individuals. Given the high level of political engagement of these individuals, these results have substantial public policy implications.

Brain-Machine Interfaces as Commodities: Exchanging Mind for Matter

Brain-machine interfaces (BMIs), which enable a two-way flow of signals, information, and directions between human neurons and computerized machines, offer spectacular opportunities for therapeutic and consumer applications, but they also present unique dangers to the safety, privacy, psychological health, and spiritual well-being of their users. The sale of these devices as commodities for profit exacerbates such issues and may subject the user to an unequal exchange with corporations. Catholic healthcare professionals and bioethicists should be especially concerned about the implications for the essential dignity of the persons using the new BMIs.

Summary

The commercial sale of brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) generates and exacerbates problems for end-users' safety, psychological health, and spiritual well-being.

Intrinsic functional connectivity of blue and red brains: neurobiological evidence of different stress resilience between political attitudes

Conservatives are more sensitive to threatening/anxious situations in perceptual and cognitive levels, experiencing emotional responses and stress, while liberals are more responsive to but tolerant of ambiguous and uncertain information. Interestingly, conservatives have greater psychological well-being and are more satisfied with their lives than liberals despite their psychological vulnerability to stress caused by threat and anxiety sensitivities. We investigated whether conservatives have greater resilience and self-regulation capacity, which are suggested to be psychological buffers that enhance psychological well-being, than liberals and moderates. We also explored associations between intrinsic functional brain organization and these psychological resources to expand our neurobiological understanding of self-regulatory processes in neuropolitics. We found that conservatives, compared to liberals and moderates, had greater psychological resilience and self-regulation capacity that were attributable to greater impulse control and causal reasoning. Stronger intrinsic connectivities between the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and precuneus and between the insula and frontal pole/OFC in conservatives were correlated with greater resilience and self-regulation capacity. These results suggest the neural underpinnings that may allow conservatives to manage the psychological stress and achieve greater life satisfaction. This study provides neuroscientific evidence for the different responses of liberals and conservatives to politically relevant social issues.

Ideology and social cognition Are liberals and conservatives differentially affected by social cues about group inequality?

Research links liberal and conservative ideological orientations with variation on psychological and cognitive characteristics that are important for perceptual processes and decision-making. This study investigates whether this variation can impact the social behaviors of liberals and conservatives. A sample of subjects (n = 1,245) participated in a modified public goods game in which an intragroup inequality was introduced to observe the effect on individuals' tendency toward self-interested versus prosocial behavior. Overall, the contributions of neither liberal- nor conservative-oriented individuals were affected by conditions of a general intragroup inequality. However, in response to the knowledge that group members voted to redress the inequality, levels of contribution among liberals significantly increased in comparison to the control. This was not true for conservatives. The results provide evidence that differences in ideological orientation are associated with individual differences in social cognition.

Conservatives and liberals have similar physiological responses to threats

About a decade ago, a study documented that conservatives have stronger physiological responses to threatening stimuli than liberals. This work launched an approach aimed at uncovering the biological roots of ideology. Despite wide-ranging scientific and popular impact, independent laboratories have not replicated the study. We conducted a pre-registered direct replication (n = 202) and conceptual replications in the United States (n = 352) and the Netherlands (n = 81). Our analyses do not support the conclusions of the original study, nor do we find evidence for broader claims regarding the effect of disgust and the existence of a physiological trait. Rather than studying unconscious responses as the real predispositions, alignment between conscious and unconscious responses promises deeper insights into the emotional roots of ideology.

The Autonomous Mind: The Right to Freedom of Thought in the Twenty-First Century

To lose freedom of thought (FoT) is to lose our dignity, our democracy and our very selves. Accordingly, the right to FoT receives absolute protection under international human rights law. However, this foundational right has been neither significantly developed nor often utilized. The contours of this right urgently need to be defined due to twenty-first century threats to FoT posed by new technologies. As such, this paper draws on law and psychology to consider what the right to FoT should be in the twenty-first century. After discussing contemporary threats to FoT, and recent developments in our understanding of thought that can inform the development of the right, this paper considers three elements of the right; the rights not to reveal one's thoughts, not to be penalized for one's thoughts, and not to have one's thoughts manipulated. The paper then considers, for each element, why it should exist, how the law currently treats it, and challenges that will shape it going forward. The paper concludes that the law should develop the right to FoT with the clear understanding that what this aims to secure is mental autonomy. This process should hence begin by establishing the core mental processes that enable mental autonomy, such as attentional and cognitive agency. The paper argues that the domain of the right to FoT should be extended to include external actions that are arguably constitutive of thought, including internet searches and diaries, hence shielding them with absolute protection. It is stressed that law must protect us from threats to FoT from both states and corporations, with governments needing to act under the positive aspect of the right to ensure societies are structured to facilitate mental autonomy. It is suggested that in order to support mental autonomy, information should be provided in autonomy-supportive contexts and friction introduced into decision making processes to facilitate second-order thought. The need for public debate about how society wishes to balance risk and mental autonomy is highlighted, and the question is raised as to whether the importance attached to thought has changed in our culture. The urgency of defending FoT is re-iterated.

Conservatism and the neural circuitry of threat: economic conservatism predicts greater amygdala-BNST connectivity during periods of threat vs safety

Political conservatism is associated with an increased negativity bias, including increased attention and reactivity toward negative and threatening stimuli. Although the human amygdala has been implicated in the response to threatening stimuli, no studies to date have investigated whether conservatism is associated with altered amygdala function toward threat. Furthermore, although an influential theory posits that connectivity between the amygdala and bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) is important in initiating the response to sustained or uncertain threat, whether individual differences in conservatism modulate this connectivity is unknown. To test whether conservatism is associated with increased reactivity in neural threat circuitry, we measured participants’ self-reported social and economic conservatism and asked them to complete high-resolution fMRI scans while under threat of an unpredictable shock and while safe. We found that economic conservatism predicted greater connectivity between the BNST and a cluster of voxels in the left amygdala during threat vs safety. These results suggest that increased amygdala–BNST connectivity during threat may be a key neural correlate of the enhanced negativity bias found in conservatism.

The "chicken-and-egg" development of political opinions

Twin studies have revealed political ideology to be partially heritable. Neurological research has shown that ideological differences are reflected in brain structure and response, suggesting a direct genotype-phenotype link. Social and informational environments, however, also demonstrably affect brain structure and response. This leads to a "chicken-and-egg" question: do genes produce brains with ideological predispositions, causing the preferential absorption of consonant information and thereby forming an ideology, or do social and informational environments do most of the heavy lifting, with genetic evidence the spurious artifact of outdated methodology? Or are both inextricably intertwined contributors? This article investigates the relative contributions of genetic and environmental factors to ideological development using a role-play experiment investigating the development of opinions on a novel political issue. The results support the view that the process is bidirectional, suggesting that, like most traits, political ideology is produced by the complex interplay of genetic and (social/informational) environmental influences.

Social cues and ideology

Research shows that individuals with liberal and conservative ideological orientations display different value positions concerning the acceptance of social change and inequality. Research also links the expression of different values to a number of biological factors, including heredity. In light of these biological influences, I investigate whether differences in social values associated with liberal and conservative ideologies reflect alternative strategies to maximize returns from social interactions. Using an American sample of Democrats and Republicans, I test whether information about shared and unshared social values in the form of implicit social attitudes have a disproportionate effect on the willingness of Democrats and Republicans to trust an anonymous social partner. I find evidence that knowledge of shared values significantly increases levels of trust among Democrats but not Republicans. I further find that knowledge of unshared values significantly decreases trust among Republicans but not Democrats. These findings are consistent with studies indicating that differences in ideological orientation are linked to differences in cognition and decision-making.

Psychopathy to Altruism: Neurobiology of the Selfish-Selfless Spectrum

The age-old philosophical, biological, and social debate over the basic nature of humans as being “universally selfish” or “universally good” continues today highlighting sharply divergent views of natural social order. Here we analyze advances in biology, genetics and neuroscience increasing our understanding of the evolution, features and neurocircuitry of the human brain underlying behavior in the selfish–selfless spectrum. First, we examine evolutionary pressures for selection of altruistic traits in species with protracted periods of dependence on parents and communities for subsistence and acquisition of learned behaviors. Evidence supporting the concept that altruistic potential is a common feature in human populations is developed. To go into greater depth in assessing critical features of the social brain, the two extremes of selfish–selfless behavior, callous unemotional psychopaths and zealous altruists who take extreme measures to help others, are compared on behavioral traits, structural/functional neural features, and the relative contributions of genetic inheritance versus acquired cognitive learning to their mindsets. Evidence from population groups ranging from newborns, adopted children, incarcerated juveniles, twins and mindfulness meditators point to the important role of neuroplasticity and the dopaminergic reward systems in forming and reforming neural circuitry in response to personal experience and cultural influences in determining behavior in the selfish–selfless spectrum. The underlying neural circuitry differs between psychopaths and altruists with emotional processing being profoundly muted in psychopaths and significantly enhanced in altruists. But both groups are characterized by the reward system of the brain shaping behavior. Instead of rigid assignment of human nature as being “universally selfish” or “universally good,” both characterizations are partial truths based on the segments of the selfish–selfless spectrum being examined. In addition, individuals and populations can shift in the behavioral spectrum in response to cognitive therapy and social and cultural experience, and approaches such as mindfulness training for introspection and reward-activating compassion are entering the mainstream of clinical care for managing pain, depression, and stress.

Freedom of Thought and Mental Integrity: The Moral Requirements for Any Neural Prosthesis

There are many kinds of neural prostheses available or being researched today. In most cases they are intended to cure or improve the condition of patients affected by some cerebral deficiency. In other cases, their goal is to provide new means to maintain or improve an individual's normal performance. In all these circumstances, one of the possible risks is that of violating the privacy of brain contents (which partly coincide with mental contents) or of depriving individuals of full control over their thoughts (mental states), as the latter are at least partly detectable by new prosthetic technologies. Given the (ethical) premise that the absolute privacy and integrity of the most relevant part of one's brain data is (one of) the most valuable and inviolable human right(s), I argue that a (technical) principle should guide the design and regulation of new neural prostheses. The premise is justified by the fact that whatever the coercion, the threat or the violence undergone, the person can generally preserve a "private repository" of thought in which to defend her convictions and identity, her dignity, and autonomy. Without it, the person may end up in a state of complete subjection to other individuals. The following functional principle is that neural prostheses should be technically designed and built so as to prevent such outcomes. They should: (a) incorporate systems that can find and signal the unauthorized detection, alteration, and diffusion of brain data and brain functioning; (b) be able to stop any unauthorized detection, alteration, and diffusion of brain data. This should not only regard individual devices, but act as a general (technical) operating principle shared by all interconnected systems that deal with decoding brain activity and brain functioning.

Neuropolitics: Twenty years later

Neuropolitics is the intersection of neuroscience and political science, and it has the interdisciplinary goal of transforming both disciplines. This article reviews the past 20 years of work in the field, identifying its roots, some overarching themes-reactions to political attitudinal questions and candidates faces, identification of political ideology based on brain structure or reactivity to nonpolitical stimuli, and racial attitudes-and obstacles to its progress. I then explore the methodological and analytical advances that point the way forward for the future of neuropolitics. Although the field has been slow to develop compared with neurolaw and neuroeconomics, innovations look ripe for dramatically improving our ability to model political behaviors and attitudes in individuals and predict political choices in mass publics. The coming advancements, however, pose risks to our current norms of democratic deliberation, and academics need to anticipate and mitigate these risks.

The biological roots of political extremism

Recent research has revealed the complex origins of political identification and the possible effects of this identification on social and political behavior. This article reports the results of a structural equation analysis of national survey data that attempts to replicate the finding that an individual's negativity bias predicts conservative ideology. The analysis employs the Motivational Activation Measure (MAM) as an index of an individual's positivity offset and negativity bias. In addition, information-seeking behavior is assessed in relation to traditional and interactive media sources of political information. Results show that although MAM does not consistently predict political identification, it can be used to predict extremeness of political views. Specifically, high negativity bias was associated with extreme conservatism, whereas low negativity bias was associated with extreme liberalism. In addition, political identification was found to moderate the relationship between motivational traits and information-seeking behavior.

Towards new human rights in the age of neuroscience and neurotechnology

Rapid advancements in human neuroscience and neurotechnology open unprecedented possibilities for accessing, collecting, sharing and manipulating information from the human brain. Such applications raise important challenges to human rights principles that need to be addressed to prevent unintended consequences. This paper assesses the implications of emerging neurotechnology applications in the context of the human rights framework and suggests that existing human rights may not be sufficient to respond to these emerging issues. After analysing the relationship between neuroscience and human rights, we identify four new rights that may become of great relevance in the coming decades: the right to cognitive liberty, the right to mental privacy, the right to mental integrity, and the right to psychological continuity.

Conservatism and liberalism predict performance in two nonideological cognitive tasks

Intuitive thinking would argue that political or ideological orientation does not correlate with nonpolitical decisions, and certainly not with nonideological cognitive tasks. However, that is what happens in some cases. Previous neuropolitics studies have found that liberals are more adept at dealing with novel information than conservatives. This finding suggests that conservatives and liberals possess different cognitive skills. For the purposes of this article, two studies were executed to test whether this difference remained in alternative environmental settings. To this end, two novel cognitive tasks were designed in which one type of ideology or another was privileged according to the cognitive environment created by the tasks. Experimental findings indicate that liberals committed fewer errors than conservatives in one kind of cognitive environment, while conservatives scored higher in another.

In search of the moral-psychological and neuroevolutionary basis of political partisanship

In many countries, a radical political divide brings several socially relevant decisions to a standstill. Could cognitive, affective and social (CAS) neuroscience help better understand these questions? The present article reviews the moral-psychological and neuroevolutionary basis of the political partisanship divide. A non-systematic literature review and a conceptual analysis were conducted. Three main points are identified and discussed: 1) Political partisan behavior rests upon deep moral emotions. It is automatically processed and impervious to contradiction. The moral motifs characterizing political partisanship are epigenetically set across different cultures;2) partisanship is linked to personality traits, whose neural foundations are associated with moral feelings and judgement;3) Self-deception is a major characteristic of political partisanship that probably evolved as an evolutionary adaptive strategy to deal with the intragroup-extragroup dynamics of human evolution. CAS neuroscience evidence may not resolve the political divide, but can contribute to a better understanding of its biological foundations.

Party differences in political content on social media

Purpose

Social networking sites (SNS) increasingly serve as a source of political content for Americans. The purpose of this paper is to clarify the relationships between types of political content exposure, especially congruent vs incongruent content, and its effects on political expression and participation. This study pays special attention to whether these relationships differ depending on whether an individual affiliates with the Republican or Democratic party.

Design/methodology/approach

This study uses a representative national sample to examine the relationships among exposure to congruent vs incongruent political content via SNS, political expression, and political participation. This study also tests whether these relationships are consistent for Democrats vs Republicans.

Findings

The results suggest the effects of political content exposure on political expression on SNS depend on how many friends post about politics, as well as whether that content is congruent or incongruent with one’s political beliefs. Moreover, the relationship between exposure to congruent vs incongruent content, political expression, and political participation differs for Republicans and Democrats.

Originality/value

This study highlights the need for researchers to take more care in distinguishing the type of and the audience for political content exposure via social media websites. Further, if the relationships between seeing political content via social media and acting upon such content – either through posting behaviors or participatory activities – differs by political group, it raises the potential for disparities in democratic engagement.

The hand in motion of liberals and conservatives reveals the differential processing of positive and negative information

Recent research revealed that political conservatives and liberals differ in the processing of valenced information. In particular, conservatives (vs. liberals) tend to weigh negative information more than positive information in their perception of the physical and social world. In the present work, we further investigated the ideology-based asymmetries in the processing of negative and positive information examining both the attention-grabbing power of negative information and the trajectories of the movements performed by respondents when required to categorize positive and negative stimuli. To this end we employed a modified version of the Mouse-Tracking procedure (Freeman & Ambady, 2010), recording hand movements during the execution of categorization tasks. Results showed that conservatives were indeed slower to start and execute response actions to negative stimuli, and, more specifically, the trajectories of their movements signaled avoidance tendencies aimed at increasing the distance from negative stimuli. In addition, this pattern of findings emerged both when participants were asked to categorize the stimuli according to their valence and when the same stimuli had to be categorized on the basis of irrelevant perceptual features. Overall, results demonstrate that conservatives and liberals process valenced information differently, perform different spontaneous movements when exposed to them, and that such asymmetries are largely independent from current processing goals.

Do Political and Economic Choices Rely on Common Neural Substrates? A Systematic Review of the Emerging Neuropolitics Literature

The methods of cognitive neuroscience are beginning to be applied to the study of political behavior. The neural substrates of value-based decision-making have been extensively examined in economic contexts; this might provide a powerful starting point for understanding political decision-making. Here, we asked to what extent the neuropolitics literature to date has used conceptual frameworks and experimental designs that make contact with the reward-related approaches that have dominated decision neuroscience. We then asked whether the studies of political behavior that can be considered in this light implicate the brain regions that have been associated with subjective value related to "economic" reward. We performed a systematic literature review to identify papers addressing the neural substrates of political behavior and extracted the fMRI studies reporting behavioral measures of subjective value as defined in decision neuroscience studies of reward. A minority of neuropolitics studies met these criteria and relatively few brain activation foci from these studies overlapped with regions where activity has been related to subjective value. These findings show modest influence of reward-focused decision neuroscience on neuropolitics research to date. Whether the neural substrates of subjective value identified in economic choice paradigms generalize to political choice thus remains an open question. We argue that systematically addressing the commonalities and differences in these two classes of value-based choice will be important in developing a more comprehensive model of the brain basis of human decision-making.

Genes, Culture and Conservatism-A Psychometric-Genetic Approach

The Wilson−Patterson conservatism scale was psychometrically evaluated using homogeneity analysis and item response theory models. Results showed that this scale actually measures two different aspects in people: on the one hand people vary in their agreement with either conservative or liberal catch-phrases and on the other hand people vary in their use of the “?” response category of the scale. A 9-item subscale was constructed, consisting of items that seemed to measure liberalism, and this subscale was subsequently used in a biometric analysis including genotype–environment interaction, correcting for non-homogeneous measurement error. Biometric results showed significant genetic and shared environmental influences, and significant genotype–environment interaction effects, suggesting that individuals with a genetic predisposition for conservatism show more non-shared variance but less shared variance than individuals with a genetic predisposition for liberalism.

The genetic and environmental foundations of political, psychological, social, and economic behaviors: a panel study of twins and families

Here we introduce the Genetic and Environmental Foundations of Political and Economic Behaviors: A Panel Study of Twins and Families (PIs Alford, Hatemi, Hibbing, Martin, and Smith). This study was designed to explore the genetic and environmental influences on social, economic, and political behaviors and attitudes. It involves identifying the psychological mechanisms that operate on these traits, the heritability of complex economic and political traits under varying conditions, and specific genetic correlates of attitudes and behaviors. In addition to describing the study, we conduct novel analyses on the data, estimating the heritability of two traits so far unexplored in the extant literature: Machiavellianism and Baron-Cohen's Empathizing Quotient.

Emotion, rationality, and decision-making: how to link affective and social neuroscience with social theory

In this paper, we argue for a stronger engagement between concepts in affective and social neuroscience on the one hand, and theories from the fields of anthropology, economics, political science, and sociology on the other. Affective and social neuroscience could provide an additional assessment of social theories. We argue that some of the most influential social theories of the last four decades-rational choice theory, behavioral economics, and post-structuralism-contain assumptions that are inconsistent with key findings in affective and social neuroscience. We also show that another approach from the social sciences-plural rationality theory-shows greater compatibility with these findings. We further claim that, in their turn, social theories can strengthen affective and social neuroscience. The former can provide more precise formulations of the social phenomena that neuroscientific models have targeted, can help neuroscientists who build these models become more aware of their social and cultural biases, and can even improve the models themselves. To illustrate, we show how plural rationality theory can be used to further specify and test the somatic marker hypothesis. Thus, we aim to accelerate the much-needed merger of social theories with affective and social neuroscience.

Differences in negativity bias underlie variations in political ideology

Disputes between those holding differing political views are ubiquitous and deep-seated, and they often follow common, recognizable lines. The supporters of tradition and stability, sometimes referred to as conservatives, do battle with the supporters of innovation and reform, sometimes referred to as liberals. Understanding the correlates of those distinct political orientations is probably a prerequisite for managing political disputes, which are a source of social conflict that can lead to frustration and even bloodshed. A rapidly growing body of empirical evidence documents a multitude of ways in which liberals and conservatives differ from each other in purviews of life with little direct connection to politics, from tastes in art to desire for closure and from disgust sensitivity to the tendency to pursue new information, but the central theme of the differences is a matter of debate. In this article, we argue that one organizing element of the many differences between liberals and conservatives is the nature of their physiological and psychological responses to features of the environment that are negative. Compared with liberals, conservatives tend to register greater physiological responses to such stimuli and also to devote more psychological resources to them. Operating from this point of departure, we suggest approaches for refining understanding of the broad relationship between political views and response to the negative. We conclude with a discussion of normative implications, stressing that identifying differences across ideological groups is not tantamount to declaring one ideology superior to another.