Citation

Schreiber D, Fonzo GA, Simmons AN, Dawes CT, Flagan T, Fowler JH, Paulus MP. PLoS One 2013; 8(2): e52970.

Affiliation

Department of Politics, University of Exeter, Exeter, United Kingdom ; Department of Political Science, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2013, Public Library of Science)

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0052970

PMID

23418419

Abstract

Liberals and conservatives exhibit different cognitive styles and converging lines of evidence suggest that biology influences differences in their political attitudes and beliefs. In particular, a recent study of young adults suggests that liberals and conservatives have significantly different brain structure, with liberals showing increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, and conservatives showing increased gray matter volume in the in the amygdala. Here, we explore differences in brain function in liberals and conservatives by matching publicly-available voter records to 82 subjects who performed a risk-taking task during functional imaging. Although the risk-taking behavior of Democrats (liberals) and Republicans (conservatives) did not differ, their brain activity did. Democrats showed significantly greater activity in the left insula, while Republicans showed significantly greater activity in the right amygdala. In fact, a two parameter model of partisanship based on amygdala and insula activations yields a better fitting model of partisanship than a well-established model based on parental socialization of party identification long thought to be one of the core findings of political science. These results suggest that liberals and conservatives engage different cognitive processes when they think about risk, and they support recent evidence that conservatives show greater sensitivity to threatening stimuli.

Language: en