Do Liberals and Conservatives Have Differences in the Brain?
posted by Daniel Solove
From ABC News:
Liberals and conservatives think in fundamentally different ways, researchers reported in a study published Sunday in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
The study, conducted at New York University, suggested that while conservatives are known to be more structured and persistent when making decisions, liberals are more open to new experiences. Researchers have traced these stereotypes to differences in brain activity.
“Political orientation is based on the fundamental way our brains process information,” said lead study author David Amodio, assistant professor of psychology at NYU.
“There is a range of ways that people process information. Some people are more comfortable seeing the pros and cons of a situation. Others are more comfortable to see the situation in only one way.” . . . .
What researchers found was that liberals were better at processing this conflicting information. The liberals were about 10 percent more likely to hold back from an incorrect response than their conservative counterparts.
Conservatives, on the other hand, were more likely to stay the course. . . .
Liberals showed much more brain activity in the anterior cingulate, a region of the brain that processes conflicting information. . . .
And I always thought that the differences between liberals and conservatives could be explained by the fact that liberals are just smarter . . . but it’s good to know that liberals are more flexible and open-minded as well. Of course, none of this applies to conservatives who are my friends. . . .
September 11, 2007 at 5:12 pm
Posted in: Politics
Print This Post
Responses (5)
Patrick S. O'Donnell - September 11, 2007 at 6:22 pm
As I’m in the middle of something (well, I took a break and read this post; and I know most of us are in the middle of something most of the time), I can’t comment in detail (I know, some of you are relieved), but I will paste a comment I made to a post on “Neuroeconomics, Law and Emotions” by Professor Peter H. Huang over at “Biolaw: Law and the Life Sciences” (part of Jim Chen’s delightful Jurisdynamics Network) that I think is no less pertinent here:
From some perspectives in philosophy of mind, the ways in which the literature from neuroscience is being exploited is troubling. Anyone in the legal profession enchanted by such literature would be well-served by a dose a scepticism, and better served by acquaintance with more philosophically sophisticated appraisals of this literature, especially if it is thought to be relevant to the law and public policy questions in general. Among the titles one might read: M.R. Bennett and P.M.S. Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), Sunny Auyang, Mind in Everyday Life and Cognitive Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), Vincent Descombes, The Mind’s Provisions: A Critique of Cognitivism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), as well as many of the books Hilary Putnam has written since Reason, Truth and History (1981). I think it is very important that we understand that the mind is not reducible to the brain (or at least that there are strong reasons for not believing in mind/brain identity and/or being crystal clear as to the sorts of inferences [i.e., circumscribing more strongly than has been the practice to date] that might be drawn from inductively discovering strong “correlates” between neural activity and mental states). To be sure, not a few philosophies regnant today are more or less “scientistic,” but there are philosophical viewpoints on the mind and brain that question in the first instance some of the claims coming from neuroscientists about the relevance of their findings, let alone the claims of those outside neuroscience proper who are eager to apply these findings to their own intellectual fields of inquiry or socio-economic and political worlds. For instance, and briefly if not paradigmatically, to speak of “wanting” and “liking” in terms of the brain (or ‘brain systems’) makes no sense whatsoever, for the brain neither wants nor likes. (This elementary fact is thoroughly explored in the Bennett and Hacker volume; the former is an esteemed neuroscientist, the latter is a distinguished philosopher.)
Incidentally, the fact the literature in an area is burgeoining, becoming something of a cottage industry, is not a testament to its plausibility or worthiness. There’s an enormous amount of literature in the field of Evolutionary Psychology, and much of it is of dubious or little scientific merit: the claims are often extragavant, and the philosophical (philosophy of science) presuppositions and assumptions are often tenuous or eminently arguable in a way not routinely acknowledged or understood by many of its foremost or well-known practitioners.
So, again, before we get too excited about the findings from neuroscience, let’s take a deep breath and delve a bit more deeply into some of the philosophical issues that are sometimes hidden, forgotten or otherwise worthy of address….
With regard to the research above, and although I’m hardly a conservative (well, in some cultural sense I’m a bit conservative), I think conservatives (and liberals for that matter) can safely ignore this nonsense.
Nate Oman - September 11, 2007 at 10:03 pm
“And I always thought that the differences between liberals and conservatives could be explained by the fact that liberals are just smarter . . . but it’s good to know that liberals are more flexible and open-minded as well. Of course, none of this applies to conservatives who are my friends. . . . ”
Dan, I just want you to know that I am not offended. After all, we all knew that liberals were wishy-washy weenies with no gumption or stick-to-it-ness. Present company excepted, of course.
marcuse j'accuse - September 12, 2007 at 8:01 pm
Sounds a bit like an empirical effort to verify Marcuse’s conclusions in the Authoritarian personality:
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20070905.html
Patrick S. O'Donnell - September 12, 2007 at 9:42 pm
“Marcuse’s conclusions?” The Authoritarian Personality (1950) was written by Theodor Adorno and his associates (which did not include Herbert Marcuse). While Marcuse may have accepted its thesis, his imaginative Freudo-Marxist work was of a decidedly different sort, as evidenced by Eros and Civilization (1955).
Patrick S. O'Donnell - September 12, 2007 at 9:47 pm
The parenthetical remark was in reference to the book, as Marcuse was associated with Adorno, Horkheimer, Fromm and other members of the so-called Frankfurt School.
Leave a Reply