Left wing or right wing? It's written in the brain | Hacker News Reader

Left wing or right wing? It's written in the brain

ucl.ac.uk

22 pointsAnchor13 comments

Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners, Professor Rees and his colleague Dr Ryota Kanai at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL (University College London) analysed the brain structures of ninety young adults who had reported their political attitudes on a scale from 'very conservative' to 'very liberal'. They found a strong correlation between an individual's view and the structure of the brain, particularly two regions.

Maybe someone can correct me but this also looks like "we MRIed a small number of students and then compared so many brain structures that we'd be bound to find some sort of correlation with their dubious self reported political leanings."

Agreed. One wouldn't think of analysing, say, Firefox by photographing inside a computer.

That, coupled with the depressing tendency in politics to think that people who disagree must be mentally ill somehow, makes the whole business shudder-worthy.

The projection of as complex and multidimensional a thing as political views onto a one-dimensional left-right or liberal-conservative axis is necessarily an oversimplification. For example, would libertarians be classified as conservatives using this analysis because of their free-market emphasis? Would big-government neocons be classified as liberals because of their fondness for big government? If that is the case, I expect that a lot of "lefties" and "liberals" would demonstrate a "right-wing" or "conservative" mindset (and vice versa) if they participated in a similar examination.

It's simply that the vast majority of people fit in that left-right axis.

I really don't think them majority of people fit on a simple line. It's more that that is presented as the only option.

If we plot a Nolan chart, people would be heavily clustered along the leftwing-rightwing diagonal, with some variance, of course, but a strong trend nonetheless.

What worries me most about this is that a prominent UK university is using the American term "Liberal" to mean left wing.

Outside the US "liberal" generally means what we call classically liberal in the US or borderline libertarian.

That liberal means left wing in the US is extremely confusing for non Americans.

I've noticed that in the US, the term "liberal" carries a high level of baggage, and seems to elicit reactions from all sides. I suppose that this could be due to the influence of right-of-centre talk radio, where the term seems to be particularly demonized.

Here in Canada, "Liberal" is a major political party, as is "Conservative". With that said, we have several other parties in Parliament, as well.

As noted (towards the end of the article): correlation does not imply causation.

Strictly speaking, the brain is the physical manifestation of the mind, so aspects of the mind would be bound to be related to physical phenomena in the brain. What's uncertain is if this study actually found a physical thing, or random data.

As someone who grew up hyper conservative and has been becoming liberalized ever since - I can't help thinking this study is off. Did my brain structure really change, or was I a lib-brainer the whole time?

And here I thought we just voted how our parents do.

Breaking news: mental cognitive models are reflected in brain structure. Film at eleven.

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