Feb 14, 2023 06:00:00

``Why is the interpretation completely different if the supporting political party is different even if you see the same thing?'' Is clarified neurologically

It often happens that despite seeing the same news, the way of understanding is 180 degrees different depending on whether the political stance is left or right. A new study that scans the brains of people processing political news has revealed the mechanisms by which such biases occur in the brain.

Shared neural representations and temporal segmentation of political content predict ideological similarity | Science Advances

https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abq5920

Study offers neurological explanation for how brains bias parties against new information | Brown University
https://www.brown.edu/news/2023-02-01/political-brain

The United States has a two-party system in which the Democratic Party and the Republican Party compete for votes. The impressions and interpretations received are the exact opposite. The conventional wisdom holds that this kind of political bias is the result of selective consumption of news and social media, the result of choosing what to know.

According to this

theory , if you continue to be exposed to political views that differ from yours, your bias should eventually disappear. ” is shown.

Therefore, a research team led by Oriel Feldmanhol, a cognitive scientist at the Kearny Institute for Brain Sciences at Brown University in the United States, asked a total of 44 subjects, 22 liberals and 22 conservatives, to use images and videos to express political views. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which analyzes blood flow changes in brain activity during presentation of words, was investigated.

According to Feldmanhall, when a person sees a simple, static image like a word, the brain expresses that word with a specific activity pattern. This cranial nerve pattern is like a fingerprint, so it seems that researchers call it 'neural fingerprint'.

When the research team scanned the brain with fMRI while showing the subject words that are often used politically such as `` abortion '', `` immigration '', `` gang '', and ambiguous words like `` freedom '', liberal The neural fingerprints produced by the brains of conservatives are similar to those of other liberals, and the neural fingerprints of conservatives are similar.

The research team also found that people with the same ideology have similar neural patterns in the brain while watching videos of political debates. This is thought to be due in large part to their similar neural fingerprints for political concepts and words.

Regarding the results of this series of experiments, Mr. Feldmanhall said, ``The problem of political bias cannot be addressed at a superficial level. even influences the way we perceive political language.'