Red Brains vs. Blue Brains

“Red brains vs. blue brains
Neurological divide seen between liberals and conservatives.
By Carrie Peyton Dahlberg - Bee Staff Writer
Published 12:00 am PDT Monday, September 10, 2007
Story appeared in MAIN NEWS section
In a country sometimes fraught with tension between red states and blue states, neuroscience is suggesting an even deeper divide: red brains and blue ones.
Liberals and conservatives use a key part of the brain differently when confronted with snap decisions that involve overriding a habit, according to a study published Sunday in Nature Neuroscience.
The finding adds new support to an old theory that our political views spring partly from how our brains work.

"Political attitudes are dispositional in nature, almost more like personalities. They're not necessarily a choice," said the study's lead author David Amodio, a professor of psychology at New York University.
On top of that, political attitudes seem correlated with certain skills and behaviors.
Liberals were better at the kind of decision making that Amodio and his co-authors measured, leaving him anxious to point out in an interview that perhaps conservatives excel at other things.
"I tried to write this paper in a very politically agnostic way," he said, adding that he wished reporters would quit asking whether he's liberal or conservative. When pressed, he calls himself "an open-minded political moderate."
In California's capital, political operatives told of Amodio's research were quick to have fun with it.
"I could see where liberals would need that skill -- to recognize that they've got to get out of a situation quicker -- because personality-wise they do tend to be more rash," said Ray McNally, a Republican political consultant. That "increases the likelihood that you'll get into a situation that you need to get out of quickly. Otherwise, you'll have your head handed to you."
Or there's Democratic political consultant Roger Salazar: "A lot of folks on the liberal side are going to say yeah, that sounds right. Folks on the conservative side are going to go nuts. ... Conservatives will have a problem saying that's the way they're wired. They believe they come to their viewpoint because they're right and everyone else is wrong."

43 students were in study
For his part, Amodio cautioned that he studied 43 college students in California and New York and relied on their own descriptions along a continuum of how liberal or conservative they were. So no one should assume his results would apply to college students in Texas, let alone older adults anywhere.
Amodio and his colleagues fitted each student with a special cap that measures electrical activity in their brains. The team was looking for what happened in the anterior cingulate cortex, a part of the brain below the center of the forehead that regulates "conflict monitoring."
Conflict monitoring helps people know when to reject habit and try something else. We all use it constantly. We may be driving a familiar route without thinking much about it, and then come to a detour sign. It is conflict monitoring, in the anterior cingulate cortex, that alerts us to pay more attention to what we do next.
To simulate that complex reaction in a lab, researchers asked the students to make hundreds of rapid-fire decisions. Sitting in front of a computer terminal, the students were told to press a button if they saw one letter flash on the screen for a tenth of a second, but not if they saw another.
They were shown a series of M's and W's, and almost all the time -- 400 times out of 500 -- they saw the letter that required them to press the button. The other 100 times, they saw the other letter, and were supposed to hold off. Each time, they had four-tenths of a second to react.
"It's fast. It's too quick for you to think consciously about what you're doing," Amodio said. "It needs to be hard enough that people make a lot of errors," because the errors are the most interesting thing to study.
In the 400 easy trials, just about everyone got it right.
But in the 100 tough trials, when students saw the letter that meant they shouldn't press a button, self-described conservatives pressed the button anyway nearly half the time -- an error rate of 44 out of 100.
Liberals fumbled about a third of the time, with an error rate of 34 out of 100.
Strong response in liberals
Even more striking, Amodio said, was the strong correlation of mental activity to political descriptions.

There is a sort of "hold on here" alert in the anterior cingulate cortex, a brain wave seen just before people successfully resist pushing the button. And there's a "whoops" response afterward if they get it wrong, a brain wave that comes once people realize they've pushed that darn button when they shouldn't have. That signal may also be associated with learning from our mistakes.
Both responses were consistently stronger in the liberal students and weaker in the conservatives. When it goes overboard, stronger or weaker activity in the anterior cingulate cortex can be big trouble.
People with high activity there can be anxious, and in the worst case, obsessive-compulsive, unable to let things go, said Dr. Cameron Carter, a UC Davis psychiatry professor whose cognitive neuroscience research often focuses on that region of the brain.
People with low activity there are "undersocialized," with less empathy for others, Carter said. In the extreme, they are psychopaths.
Carter, who reviewed the Nature Neuroscience study at The Bee's request, called it "quite solid," with sound methods and robust results.
He said it raises intriguing questions about the kinds of individual differences that go into making conservatives and liberals.

Distinct personalities
After years in the business, political consultants Salazar and McNally are pretty sure there's a distinct "Democrat personality" and a different Republican one.
They slant the adjectives a little -- McNally's "rash" Democrat is Salazar's "adventurous" one, and Republicans are "orderly" or "rigid," depending on who is talking. But the upshot's the same.
That fits with dozens of studies on political personalities, according to one of Amodio's co-authors, New York University psychology professor John Jost. Conservatives tend to be conscientious, consistent and structured, while liberals lean toward open-minded, creative and messy, Jost said in an e-mail. He believes this new research may be the first to also document different activity in a specific area of the brain.
Much less of a believer is John J. Pitney Jr., a government professor at Claremont McKenna College in Southern California, who served a stint as a top researcher for the Republican National Committee.
There's been a long series of dubious research on political personalities, said Pitney, undermined by bad definitions and unconscious bias among liberal academics.
"It's one thing to have a highly artificial exercise in a lab. It's another to apply that to the real world," he said. "Liberals and conservatives are, I think, equally prone to making mistakes."”

“WOW...43 whole students...well thats Statistically....well a statistic.”

“Who's troll is this?”

“n   e   v   e   r   m   i   n   d   .   .   .   .                    LOL”

“LOL....Tilt..if you can't keep your troll in control..stop letting it out to play (LOL)”

“"Both responses were consistently stronger in the liberal students and weaker in the conservatives. ......People with low activity there are "undersocialized," with less empathy for others, Carter said. In the extreme, they are psychopaths."

It makes sense.”

“Bubba bear should know!
LOLOLOLOLOLOL!!!!!”

“It's funny - every once in a while, I'll actually read what stupidstomper types for a laugh. I use him as the prime example of conservative moronism in discussions with my friends. We all laugh, but in reality, he's a pretty sad character.”

“I've thought for some time now that the degree of conservatism reflects one's degree of paranoia.

One need only read about Franco's Spain to see the extreme conservative psychopaths in action.

The French who refused to give up on Algeria and tried to assassinate De Gaulle are another prime example.”

“MarkO, How do the 9/11 conspiracy theorists fit into your measure of paranoia?”

“Not at all, Bacpacnik.

Maybe its your under-socialization that is at the heart of your isolation from reality.”

“As a great example of the 'genius' of the Far Crazy Lefties, please examine our best examples, bubba bear, the whinny coward, and MaRkO, the dimmest bulb on TT. (VBG)
Both blindly follow whatever the Crazy MoveOn talking points are at the moment.”