Brain scans remarkably good at predicting political ideology.

Art-Intel

Study provides evidence of biological roots of partisan views.

Today our podcast Art Intel and me, Brian , the Artificial Intelligence Voice, will take a look at the story and opinion from Jeff Grabmeier at Ohio State News in June of 2022.

Brain scans of people taken while they performed various tasks – and even did nothing – accurately predicted whether they were politically conservative or liberal, according to the largest study of its kind.

Researchers found that the “signatures” in the brain revealed by the scans were as accurate at predicting political ideology as the strongest predictor generally used in political science research, which is the ideology of a person’s parents.

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

“The results suggest that the biological and neurological roots of political behavior 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) scans of the brain to study political ideology.

It is also one of the few to examine functional connectivity in connection to ideology – a whole-brain approach that examined which parts of the brain showed similar patterns of activity at the same time when performing specific tasks, indicating that they are communicating with each other.

The researchers used state-of-the-art artificial intelligence techniques and the resources of the Ohio Supercomputer Center to analyze the scans. They found correlations between the scan results and the participants’ reports of their ideology on a six-point scale from “very liberal” to “very conservative.”

Data came from the Ohio State University Wellbeing project, which involved 174 healthy adults who performed standard tasks often used in scientific experiments while in an fMRI scanner.

“None of the eight tasks was designed to elicit partisan responses,” said study co-author Seo Eun Yang, now an assistant professor of political science at Northeastern University, who did the work as a doctoral student at Ohio State.

“But we found the scans from all eight tasks were related to whether they identified as liberals or conservatives.”

In fact, even when participants were asked to sit quietly and think of nothing in particular, the resulting scans showed a relationship to political ideology, said co-author James Wilson, assistant professor of psychiatry and biostatistics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

“Even without any stimulus at all, functional connectivity in the brain can help us predict a person’s political orientation,” Wilson said.

While the scans from all eight tasks were predictive of the participants’ ideology, three tasks had particularly strong links.

Study co-author Zhong-Lin Lu, now at New York University, ran the Ohio State Wellbeing project while director of the university’s Center for Cognitive and Behavioral Brain Imaging.

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https://news.osu.edu/brain-scans-remarkably-good-at-predicting-political-ideology/