The conservative brain

According to an article in the Chicago Tribune today, decades of research have shown that conservatives tend to be "more rigid and closed-minded, less tolerant of ambiguity and less open to new experiences."  New research shows that there may be a difference in brain function, or as the front-page headline in my local paper says, "Political ideologies may be hard-wired" into the human brain.

By monitoring electrical activity in one part of the cortex, scientists at UCLA and NYU have found that when a change in behavior is needed, the brains of self-styled conservatives have fewer neurons firing in that part than are observed in liberals' brains.

"Say you drive home from work the same way every day, but one day there's a detour and you need to override your autopilot," said David Amodio, a professor at New York University. "Most people function just fine. But there's a little variability in how sensitive people are to the cue that they need to change their current course."

That "cue" is processed in a part of the brain known as the anterior cingulate cortex, and Amodio was able to monitor its electrical activity by hooking his subjects up to electroencephalographs (EEGs) while they performed laboratory tests.

In the tests, 43 college students were told to press "Go" whenever a computer flashed the letter "M".  If a "W" was displayed, they were supposed to do nothing.

Amodio said the "Go" stimulus came up 400 out of 500 times, so "they're sitting there getting in the habit of pressing this button. But 20 percent of the time, the 'No Go' stimulus comes up -- it's unexpected -- and they're supposed to do nothing. We can see how accurate people are at withholding the habitual response." Subjects who rated themselves more liberal had higher scores for accuracy, Amodio said. But more importantly, they also showed stronger electrical activity when the "No Go" cues were presented, indicating that more neurons were firing.

The article in the Tribune also lists conservative traits found in previous studies, such as the right-wingers "fear, aggression, tolerance of inequality and lack of complexity in their thinking."  Liberals aren't flattered either, as they can be "relatively disorganized, indecisive and perhaps overly drawn to ambiguity."

The article concludes that if political ideology has a biological basis, perhaps we can be more tolerant of our opponents whose brains work differently.

UPDATE: See the post below by Clio2 for more and very valuable information about the experiment (with different conclusions) in the L.A. Times.