If you think people with opposite political ideologies are wired differently than you, a recent study in the scientific journal Politics and the Life Sciences reveals you may be correct.
In a study titled “Differential brain activations between Democrats and Republicans when considering food purchases,” authors Amanda S. Bruce, John M. Crespi, Dermot J Hayes, Angelos Lagoudakis, Jayson L. Lusk, Darren M. Schreiber and Qianrong Wu studied 65 politically engaged adults in the Kansas City area. The University of Kansas Medical Center and the University of Exeter professionals analyzed the 40 Democrats and 25 Republicans with an fMRI scanner as they had to spend $50 on groceries like varieties of milk and eggs differentiated by price, production method or both. As the patients pondered their choices, the fMRI measured concentrations of blood flow to different brain regions, thereby determining which ones were activated as people made their selections.
The finding was astonishing: When they broke down their food selection data using statistical models that predicted participants’ party affiliation, they found that their models succeeded between 76 percent and 94 percent of the time, far more than usual methods for prediction. Even though Democrats and Republicans did not differ widely in the actual groceries they chose to purchase, the underlying brain activity that went into the decision-making process diverged considerably between the two groups.
“While the food purchase decisions were not significantly different, we found that brain activation during decision-making differs according to the participant’s party affiliation,” the authors wrote. “Models of partisanship based on left insula, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, precuneus, superior frontal gyrus, or premotor/supplementary motor area activations achieve better than expected accuracy.”
Covering the story for PsyPost, journalist Karina Petrova explained that the data also managed to surprise the scientists.
“The researchers pointed out a few unexpected absences in the brain data,” Petrova wrote. “They did not see any differences in the amygdala, an emotion-processing center of the brain that has featured prominently in older studies of political ideology. The team suggested this is likely because choosing eggs or milk provides cognitive information but does not trigger the intense emotional reactions seen in experiments involving political faces or physical threats.”
This is not the first study to suggest deep psychological underpinning behind individuals’ political choices. In a 2021 paper in the scientific journal Political Psychology, researchers from Cal Poly Pomona and Eureka College conducted two studies to ascertain any links between a person’s political ideology and their openness to non-expert opinions on science. Their goal was to assess how people feel not just toward scientists but also “nonexpert” voices. To do this, surveyed individuals were shown a spectrum of opinions ranging from credible to non-credible and asked to either rate one higher than the other or deem “both sides” equally believable. They found that conservatives were more likely to either equate expert and non-expert opinions and to hold less favorable views of non-experts than experts.
“From my understanding traditional conservatism is all about individualism, so more weight is given to an individual’s experience with any given phenomenon,” Dr. Alexander Swan, assistant professor of psychology at Eureka College and a co-author of the paper, told this journalist when he interviewed him by email for Salon Magazine at the time. “This experience is fueled by our innate sense of intuition — what feels right to me? What makes sense?” While liberals also sometimes succumbed to this mindset, Swan argued that modern conservatism often requires adherents to reject ideologically inconvenient science; climate change denial is rampant, for example, because acknowledging that it is man-made “would impact the capitalistic pursuit.”
Dr. Randy Stein, assistant professor of marketing at Cal Poly Pomona and another co-author of the paper, had a similar observation to this author.
“Keep in mind, political ideology is something you can pick,” Stein told this journalist for Salon. “Trumpist/populist conservatism is pretty open as far as pushing ‘don’t believe what the media tells you’ and ‘don’t believe experts’ type thinking, so it’s going to be more attractive to those who think that way.”
By contrast, earlier this month liberal commentator Amanda Marcotte speculated to The New Republic’s Greg Sargent on his “Daily Blast” podcast that Trump supporters stick by him despite his numerous flaws and failures out of a “sunk cost fallacy” mindset.
"I think at the end of the day, the most important psychology that keeps these people on board is just that admitting that Trump is bad or wrong or a failure is admitting that all those people who, for a decade, have been telling you that you made a mistake were right,” Marcotte told Sargent. “And what's weird is the longer this drags on, the harder it is for them to let go without some kind of offramp. And I will say, if there ever was an offramp, I do kind of think the Iran war might be it — because again, they don't want another [George] Bush."
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