by is Mooney
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 interpret
s 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.
Even if liberals have more gray matter in the ACC, or if this brain region is more active in them, that doesn’t tell us whether being a liberal leads to more growth and development of the ACC, or whether having a bigger or more active ACC makes one a liberal to begin with—or both. The same question goes for conservatives and the amygdala. Meanwhile, even if these brain regions do shape our politics—which seems likely—it’s doubtful they will turn out to be the only ones.
Nevertheless, right now the neuroscience evidence is lining up behind the psychology evidence in a way that makes a fair amount of sense. Remember, most of all, the evidence from the last chapter, showing that liberals who are made to feel fear behave more like conservatives—or, more like authoritarians. It is not exactly a radical stretch to suggest that the amygdala has something to do with this effect.
Everybody has the capacity to feel fear. But recent research suggests those who have greater fear “dispositions”—a trait that’s linked to much more distrust of outsiders, including immigrants and people of different races—tend to be politically conservative. So what if it’s the case that conservatives and authoritarians have a more active amydala in general, and go through life more sensitive to fear and threat? And what if, by contrast, liberals are more prone to “switch on” and “switch off” on this dimension, and only behave like conservative-authoritarians when they’re made afraid as they were after 9/11—when a whole breed of “liberal hawks” emerged who wanted to attack Iraq?
Neither group, in this interpretation, would feel there was anything wrong with their lives or experiences. Yet for each group, life would be lived just a little bit differently, on average—and one consequence of those differences might be our political divisions.
If that’s true, then Irving Kristol’s famous remark that a neoconservative is just “a liberal who has been mugged by reality” would take on quite a new meaning.
Even assuming that this seemingly “obvious” interpretation of the neuropolitics research is correct, it tells us nothing about what causes our brains to differ in ways that correspond to our politics.
As I’ve said already, your brain could cause you to have a particular political outlook, or your political outlook could cause you to have a particular brain. Or both. And indeed, “both” is very likely the reality of the situation.
We know the brain is highly plastic. So we know that our life experiences, including our political experiences, change it. That side of things is pretty well accounted for, even if we don’t always know which regions respond to which experiences, with which changes.
The thing is, we also know that political views are partly inherited, and explained by genetics. Not fully explained, of course, but the influence of genes on our politics is surprisingly powerful. There’s a persistent body of research suggesting that 40 percent or more of the variability in our political outlooks is ultimately attributable to genetic influences. And this evidence is hard to refute, because it is based on a classic research model for detecting the genetic heritability of traits: twin studies.
So-called “identical” twins share the same DNA, and grow up in the same family environment. Meanwhile, fraternal twins also grow up in the same environment but only share half of their DNA. This leads to the time-honored twin study design. Gather large numbers of identical and fraternal twin pairs, and measure how much members of the two different kinds of pairs diverge on some trait, and you’ll be measuring how strongly genes control it.
Inevitably, for any heritable trait—height, personality, and so on—identical twins have more in common than the fraternal twins. What’s amazing is that politics is such a trait. Indeed, as previously noted, twin studies suggest that genes explain 40 percent or more of the variability in the overall political attitudes we adopt. At the same time, genes seem to account for a much smaller percentag
e of the variability in one’s political party affiliation, but that’s not necessarily so surprising. Party affiliations shift with generations and time; left-right orientations, not as quickly.
Indeed, twin studies have also been used to show that genes explain a substantial percentage of the variability in personal religiosity or spirituality, church attendance, and especially conservative religiosity or being “born again.” But they don’t predict the specific religion we’ll adopt. Our parents control that: They bring us up “Baptist,” and they bring us up “Republican.”
As with the political neuroscience research, it is very easy to misinterpret the findings of political genetics. Nobody is saying, for instance, that there is an actual “conservative gene” or a “liberal gene,” any more than that there is a “God gene.” Rather, the idea seems to be that genes create basic dispositions or tendencies that in turn produce personalities—which, in turn, predispose us to political outlooks. It’s also possible that the same baseline set of genes may influence our personalities and our political outlooks separately, and these then wind up being aligned because both are influenced by the same genetic factors—kind of like two separate limbs of a puppet being pulled by the same puppeteer. In this view, Openness may not cause liberalism; rather, they would both be influenced by the same set of genes.
But either way, something is being passed on to us that winds up getting expressed as ideology. “It’s almost impossible to deny that there are these consistent pedigrees passed down through families,” says Peter Hatemi, a political scientist and microbiologist at Penn State University who has been at the center of research on the relationship between genetics and politics—a growing field. “The basic state of who we are, that’s inherited.”
It’s important to understand what a statement like this means—and doesn’t mean. Popular misconceptions notwithstanding, it is wrong to think of human traits as being either caused by genes or caused by the environment (upbringing, life experiences, and so on). Take height, for instance. Yes, it has a genetic basis and is strongly inherited. But if you’re malnourished, you’ll stunt your height no matter what kind of basketball star your genes might otherwise have been able to produce. “Nothing is all genes, or all environment,” Hatemi explains.
