Brains of liberals, conservatives structured differently

[Dog Walker]

Some interesting reading.

http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20110407/politics-brain-structure-110407/

Brains of liberals, conservatives structured differently: study
CTV.ca News Staff
Date: Thursday Apr. 7, 2011 4:07 PM ET
Perhaps the reason that liberals and conservatives have such a hard time seeing eye-to-eye is because when they're compared brain-to-brain, they're built quite differently.
A new study that analyzed the brain structures of peoples' brains based on their political affiliations has found some significant differences.
Essentially, they found that liberals have more gray matter in a part of the brain associated with understanding complexity, while the conservative brain is bigger in the section related to processing fear.
The study, which appears in Current Biology, was conducted by Ryota Kanai of the University College London. Kenai's team looked at 90 healthy young adults who were given a survey and then asked to report their political views on a scale of one to five, from very liberal to very conservative. Their brains were then scanned.
People who reported that their views veered to the liberal side of the political spectrum tended to have a larger anterior cingulate cortex, which is a brain area involved in processing conflicting information.
Those with conservative views were more likely to have a larger amygdala, a region important for recognizing threats and processing fear.
"Individuals with a large amygdala are more sensitive to fear," and might therefore be "more inclined to integrate conservative views into their belief system," Kanai and colleagues wrote.
"On the other hand, our finding of an association between anterior cingulate cortex volume and political attitudes may be linked with tolerance to uncertainty" -- which may allow people to "accept more liberal views."
What the study couldn't answer was whether the structural differences they noted in the brains cause the differing political views, or are the effect of them.
Kanai says it's possible that brain structure isn't set in early life, but rather can be shaped over time by our experiences, which would explain why some people have been known to change their views over the course of a lifetime.
Kanai cautioned against taking the findings too far, citing many uncertainties about how the correlations they see come about.
"It's very unlikely that actual political orientation is directly encoded in these brain regions," he said. "More work is needed to determine how these brain structures mediate the formation of political attitude."

 

[PuckChaser]

90 people? Out of how many in the world? Awesome sample size for that study.

 

[Nauticus]

90 people? Out of how many in the world? Awesome sample size for that study.

Could be worse. It could be a completely random prediction made with no base at all.

This doesn't "prove" anything, but it's very interesting nonetheless.

 

[Dog Walker]

Also we do not know how good the science is. Was it a truly objective study or was there a bias in the findings? As for sample size, it most likely was limited by budget and by access to the brain scanners.  The telling point would be if others researchers can repeat the study and get similar results.

 

[Chilme]

I think this may be one of those useless studies where correlation does not equal causation.

 

[Journeyman]

Since the Global Warming circus has left town, the unemployed "scientists" had to turn to something else  ;D

 

[Container]

foolishness. They dont define what liberal or conservative is- there are many shades of each. Also- there are spelling errors. Im skeptical.

 

[Thompson_JM]

Since the Global Warming circus has left town, the unemployed "scientists" had to turn to something else  ;D

And how....

 

[ModlrMike]

So if I understand correctly:

One study of 90 people can be extrapolated out to cover roughly 7 billion?

I'd likely fail any course I cited such weak science on.

 

[ArmyRick]

100% people in study were pro military results show.

Number of people studied; 3 (including me and the two other guys in the office right now)

How is that for solid test results.

 

[Neill McKay]

The sample size is a factor in statistics, but the degree of correlation within the sample also matters .  (The "p" value mentioned in the comic strip posted above relates.)  There's no single magic number for the sample size needed to study a given population.

 

[The Bread Guy]

Here's the official abstract from the journal article:

Substantial differences exist in the cognitive styles of liberals and conservatives on psychological measures. Variability in political attitudes reflects genetic influences and their interaction with environmental factors. Recent work has shown a correlation between liberalism and conflict-related activity measured by event-related potentials originating in the anterior cingulate cortex. Here we show that this functional correlate of political attitudes has a counterpart in brain structure. In a large sample of young adults, we related self-reported political attitudes to gray matter volume using structural MRI. We found that greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala. These results were replicated in an independent sample of additional participants. Our findings extend previous observations that political attitudes reflect differences in self-regulatory conflict monitoring and recognition of emotional faces by showing that such attitudes are reflected in human brain structure. Although our data do not determine whether these regions play a causal role in the formation of political attitudes, they converge with previous work to suggest a possible link between brain structure and psychological mechanisms that mediate political attitudes.

Highlights

► Political liberalism and conservatism were correlated with brain structure
► Liberalism was associated with the gray matter volume of anterior cingulate cortex
► Conservatism was associated with increased right amygdala size
► Results offer possible accounts for cognitive styles of liberals and conservatives

When we see x, we see y - as someone else said:

The telling point would be if others researchers can repeat the study and get similar results.

 

[Nauticus]

So if I understand correctly:

One study of 90 people can be extrapolated out to cover roughly 7 billion?

I'd likely fail any course I cited such weak science on.

:

God forbid studies happen!

For your information, studies occur so that other studies may also occur. This study does not prove anything, but it does provide cause for an additional study to be done to prove/disprove the findings of this study.

I don't care if you're pro or con liberal or conservative. This study, although not very useful individually, can be very helpful in the long run.