Brains scans can predict political ideology, study claims

Imaging tests as accurate as person’s parents – the strongest known predictor, say experts

US academics found that ‘signatures’ in the brain shown by scans were as accurate at predicting political attitudes as the ideology of a person’s parents (AFP via Getty Images)

Brain scans can reveal people’s political views, suggesting ideology has biological and neurological origins, scientists say.

Researchers have discovered that scans of people’s brains taken while they performed various tasks – and even did nothing – accurately predicted whether they were politically conservative or liberal.

In the largest study of its kind, the US academics found that “signatures” in the brain shown by scans were as accurate at predicting political attitudes as the ideology of a person’s parents – the strongest known predictor.

“Can we understand political behaviour by looking solely at the brain? The answer is a fairly resounding ‘yes,’” said study co-author Skyler Cranmer, of Ohio State University.

“The results suggest that the biological and neurological roots of political behaviour run much deeper than we previously thought.”

The study, published recently in the journal PNAS Nexus, is the largest to date to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans to study political ideology.

It also examined “functional connectivity” in connection to ideology, looking at which parts of the brain showed similar patterns of activity at the same time when performing tasks, indicating that they were communicating with each other.

The Ohio State University Wellbeing project asked 174 healthy adults to perform tasks often used in experiments while in an fMRI scanner.

The participants’ reported their ideology on a six-point scale from “very liberal” to “very conservative”.

“None of the tasks was designed to elicit partisan responses,” said another study co-author, Seo Eun Yang. “But we found the scans from all eight tasks were related to whether they identified as liberals or conservatives.”

Even when participants were asked to sit quietly and think of nothing in particular, the scans showed links to political ideology.

While the scans from all eight tasks predicted ideology, three tasks had particularly strong links.

One was an empathy task, where participants were shown photos of people with neutral, happy, sad or fearful faces. The second task examined episodic memory, and the third was a reward task where participants could win or lose money based on how quickly they pushed a button.

Only the scans of the reward task predicted political extremism – those who said they were very conservative or very liberal.  And only the empathy (emotional faces) task was significantly linked with moderate ideology.

When the brain scan results were combined with factors such as age, gender, income and education, the model gave even more accurate predications than parents’ ideology.