Saturday, November 1, 2014
New study claims it has discovered how to determine who is liberal and who is conservative. Surprisingly it is not through an IQ test.
The way your brain reacts to a single disgusting image can be used to predict whether you lean to the left or the right politically.
A number of studies have probed the emotions of people along the political spectrum, and found that disgust in particular is tightly linked to political orientation. People who are highly sensitive to disgusting images – of bodily waste, gore or animal remains – are more likely to sit on the political right and show concern for what they see as bodily and spiritual purity, so tend to oppose abortion and gay marriage, for example.
A team led by Read Montague, a neuroscientist at Virginia Tech in Roanoke, recruited 83 volunteers and performed fMRI brain scans on them as they looked at a series of 80 images that were either pleasant, disgusting, threatening or neutral. Participants then rated the images for their emotional impact and completed a series of questionnaires that assessed whether they were liberal, moderate or conservative.
The brain-imaging results were then fed to a learning algorithm which compared the whole-brain responses of liberals and conservatives when looking at disgusting images versus neutral ones.
For both political groups, the algorithm was able to pick out distinct patterns of brain activity triggered by the disgusting images. And even though liberals and conservatives consciously reported similar emotional reactions to the images, the specific brain regions involved and their patterns of activation differed consistently between the two groups – so much so that they represented a neural signature of political leaning, the team concludes.
Well now, that explains a lot.
Possibly including how the conservatives can see this picture...
Personally I am fine with gross images, but of course I have had a lot of exposure to them over the years.
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