What's an easy way of finding out how someone is politically affiliated? Show them a disgusting image.
In a recent study, an international team of scientists found that how a person's brain responds to a vile image says a lot about their political beliefs.
Researchers attached volunteers to brain scanners and then showed them repulsive images, such as photos of dirty toilets and the bodies of mutilated animals, as well as neutral and pleasant photos of landscapes and babies. Researchers recorded brain activity while volunteers looked at the photos.
Volunteers then took a test that asked political hot topic questions, such as how they felt about school prayer and gay marriage to determine their political ideology.
The results were astounding: the way that volunteers responded to disgusting images accurately predicted their political leanings with an accuracy of at least 95 percent.
"Disgusting images generate neural responses that are highly predictive of political orientation even when those neural responses don't correspond with an individual's conscious reaction to the images," says Read Montague, study lead. "Remarkably, we found that the brain's response to a single disgusting image was enough to predict an individual's political ideology."
So which group, liberals or conservatives, responded more to the disgusting images? Researchers found that conservatives' brain activity increased as they viewed the vile images. However, the team doesn't understand how or why.
These researchers believe that political beliefs run as deep as our neural responses and could be related to those beliefs that once protected our ancestors against threats. The way we respond to disgusting images could be inherited from our long family lines.
"We pursued this research because previous work in a twin registry showed that political ideology— literally the degree to which someone is liberal or conservative— was highly heritable, almost as heritable as height," says Montague.
Although genetics plays a part in how tall someone is, other factors come into play, such as sleep and nutrition. Montague pointed out that political beliefs are similar, with children inheriting political ideologies from their parents.
A previous similar study done by Rice University and the University of Nebraska discovered that specific political ideologies are also something we're naturally hardwired with. In that study, responses to negative images accurately determined political beliefs.
These studies shed light on why conservatives and liberals see the world so differently, and researchers hope their results will eventually lead to an understanding between opposing groups. Perhaps if voters understand these differences as well, we can avoid "knee-jerk" reactions to political issues and learn to debate them sensibly.
Photo Credit: Free Images
