Individuals who share an ideology have more similar neural representations
science.org
science.org
It might be at least interesting to see the hypothesis tested in a multi - party - system or countries with a less polarised society. Even similar polarised countries might be an interesting study subject as an parallel experiment..
What is interesting to me is this part of the abstract:
…revealing that polarization can arise from differences in the brain’s affective valuations of political concepts.
I wonder if things are reversed in the sense that consuming the same sort of news content causes those peoples’ brains to end up with the same affective valuations. I know nothing about neuroscience but it seems if we took someone with centrist or left leaning views and subjected them to only political news from very right wing sources for a long time maybe their brains would be altered.
Is it reasonable to wonder if similarities in brain responses to political concepts comes from consuming the same sort of media messages? Is Fox News (or left wing equivalent) unwittingly changing our brains (brain washing)?
That being said, psychology is a pseudoscience so who knows what anything is anyway.
This commitment arose from their conversion experiences and their gradual, conditioned acceptance of ethical misbehavior.
I don’t have a formal definition of “brainwashing”. That term, to me, is akin to gradual, conditioned acceptance. From my reading of the article the author and I seem to have different perceptions of what the word “brainwashing” means. He does say that people are moving away from the term “brainwashing” and using terms like “coercive persuasion”.
This line too stood out to me:
We don’t say that soldiers are brainwashed to kill other people; that’s basic training.
I actually would say that soldiers are brainwashed. I use that term in a colloquial sense. I use in the sense of the video linked to below.
Let me state my question in a different way, does gradual, conditioned acceptance change one’s brain in any significant way?
Then explain political realignments. I personally have completely switched political parties in the last year, and I am not a 24 year old who’s brain wasn’t developed.
And again, American political system is rather unique in the Western world. At least it should discussed in the discussion chapter.
Did you mean nation as in ethnicity? Because otherwise I think the US's identification with the nation is pretty strong across both camps.
> And again, American political system is rather unique in the Western world.
It is? Even with multiple small parties, you'll still largely get ideological camps. It's rare that you have parties that pick their ideas from all over the place.
Nation can be seen as an consensus ideology and if you share some opinions you can get along better on other topics.
In some sense, it's the job of public education, particularly through the curricula of history and $local-official-language, to establish that consensus ideology - to create unity by exposing everyone to the same large landscape of stories, opinions and beliefs, so that any two people of a nation can quickly establish some common ground between themselves and get along.
Or, in other words: to the same reality (it doesn't matter whether it's factually accurate, only that it's widely shared).
Is there a way back to more shared reality without one side wiping out the other? A common threat that just makes the differences in perception meaningless next to the shared perception of that threat? Aliens invading would probably help, at least temporarily. Maybe, if you keep that up for two generations, they'll have forgotten most of the ideological identities that had divided them, and will only rediscover them after some amount of lasting peace?
But my guess is: it wouldn't have mattered. I don't believe that we get that behavior because Facebook enables us to be petty. I believe that we get that behavior because of the circumstances (i.e. rapidly changing economical and cultural environment that make people fearful and uncertain and will make them fall back on their core values) and people realizing that you can convince/manipulate others better if you deliver your messages in a short, meme-style format, appeal to their emotions, play into identity politics and "own" the other side. Even if you outlawed Facebook, once politicians, activists etc realize that this works, they'll use it in whatever media you allow.
The only winning move (individually) is not to play, at least that's my experience. You can tune out, concentrate on whatever you deem important and the world won't fall apart just because you're not spending your time and energy explaining to people that they're being manipulated, because after all, most things move slowly. Before each election, everybody speaks as if this was the one that matters. As if, should they lose this time, all is lost because they will destroy everything. And afterwards, everything just trots on as it always has (Yes, I'm sure there are exceptions, but in most countries the situation isn't exceptional). And if you do play and try to educate others about their manipulated intellects, all they'll see is that you are being manipulated and you're now trying to manipulate them. It feels great sometimes to tell them off and get applause, but you won't change hearts and minds, and you should be aware that it's a game.
On the other hand, I firmly believe: if you want to improve society, hug the bitter aunties, ask them how they've been and share some traditional food you can bond over, that'll make it much easier to communicate and find common ground.
Because American "ideologies" also correlate strongly to city vs rural, skin color and ethnicity, and other factors, which is not necessarily the case in many/most countries whereas there might be more choices, and the kind of people believing in each more equally diatributed...
And in any case, why would you expect this to not be the case? Should people in different living circumstances magically have the same beliefs, interests and desires?
Magically no, just practically. Which is often the case, because the ideologies concerned don't touch on rural vs urban "beliefs, interests and desires" but other divisions, like progressive vs conservative, environmental vs economic push, nationalist vs regionalist, and others. Sometimes the "beliefs, interests and desires" are even irrelevant, as dominant parties offer the same kind of programs, and it's just party loyalty that gets one to one or the other.
Germany has 5 parties in parliament (with sizable representation), the US has had two for a good while (with insignificant independent inroads). German party ideology is much more segreggated and divided among states than in Germany. Germany is much more homogeneous by population. And many other factors besides.
Just because some country has no empire to project the ugly, doesent mean its not there.
>If anything, humans are remarkably similar, and that similarity transfers even to the ugly of racism, sexism etc.
Which is neither here, nor there.
Nor does every country/culture has the same levels of racism, sexism, etc. Same way they don't have the same levels of religiousness, mass shootings, and so on.
Its all been there and it has been widespread, though not always in this shape and form.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duel
The religousness of the US and its conservatives are not that rare either. Iran comes to mind.
I think it's a worthwhile reminder as it provides an example of two things: 1) religiosity is not synonymous with conservatism and balkanization, and 2) diversity is not synonymous with an inability to cooperate or share an identity.
https://www.google.com/search?q=weird%20research%20
They could test religious ideologies, wonder if they would get the same thing.
So there's more to the story but that graph is really easy to make fun of because it looks like a linear regression.
EDIT: Turns out it’s a dyadic regression and Sabine doesn’t know what she is talking about.
I mean, it's not that deep of a theory, especially in the old days were people moved a lot less and culture norms were strongly enforced
You could deduce where people came from by how they looked because the world was much more inbred and isolated in the past. As such you could correlate physical characteristic with cultural upbringings and thus worldviews.
I've just found it's referred to as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physiognomy
See also:
edit: search for "Like owner, like dog"
e.g., https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/smarter-you-think/20...
The notion that individuals should be punished for circumstances outside of their control is as problematic as jailing someone for getting the flu.
This isn’t to claim that criminal behavior is acceptable or that nothing should be done about it, but the change in understanding of the behavior itself would immediately demand a shift towards rehabilitation instead of punishment/vengeance.
Some people are still gonna have to be locked up, just like critically ill patients require ongoing care. But headlines like “scientists make breakthrough discovery in correcting brain chemistry that leads to sociopathy” will be as exciting as headlines about cancer cures.
Nope, I have no free will with which to choose to stop imprisoning people in horrible conditions.
Because what they're asking is "What if we could fundamentally change existence?" That's what it would take to perform these reforms without the existence of free will. Because people wouldn't have the choice to do whatever.
So while we would have to accept that not only are criminals incapable of doing anything different, but also the police are incapable of doing anything different, and the people hiring them, etc. Turtles all the way down.
Nothing changes.
This is an oversimplification/misreading of the philosophical ideas behind the notion that free will might not exist.
Proponents of the 'no free will' camp generally understand this to mean that we are not the conscious authors of our thoughts, and that thoughts are the product of one's lifetime of experiences and the result of those experience on one's specific biology.
In such a model of the world, the police would absolutely be capable of change, since knowledge is a potent change agent.
We already society is capable of this kind of change by looking at the history of slavery. A growing understanding of the value of each human life made the abolition of slavery a moral imperative for similar reasons. Such a cultural shift didn't happen overnight, though.
And if free will absolutely does not exist and we're just the results of the sum of our experiences, then it's also inevitable that the abolition of slavery was going to happen because that's the sum of the total.
Free will is binary. You can't have just a little of it. And if the argument is that a lot of what we do is unconscious, then that's not arguing against free will. That's arguing against something else.
This is as preventative, restorative and rehabilitative as it could ever be?
> Some people are still gonna have to be locked up
The point is not that people do not need to be deterred, but that the nature of that deterrence and the policies related to locking people up must change with such a revelation.
Such a revelation would also explain rates of recidivism, and shine a light on how counterproductive our current policies most likely are.
As we learn more about the brain, some form of this is already playing out. Accused criminals have been exhonerated on account of tumors growing on their brains, the removal of which returned the individual to “normal”.
Tumors are obvious, but as we learn more, I suspect we’ll find that many forms of criminality may be treatable.
I've found that successful people generally don't like the idea that their achievements might not be the product of their own clever and freely made choices.
There is an epistemological problem with evaluating the objectivity and authority of such statements, as well as a question of fitness for local conditions. These things can be in conflict, there is no one global correct answer.
> It is important to note that throughout our analyses, the topic of immigration elicited the strongest polarized response. That these effects did not extend to the other political topics is likely the result of the political climate at the time of data collection, which took place at the beginning of 2019, only a few months after D. Trump introduced the Build the Wall, Enforce the Law Act.
So it doesn't seem that there is a difference in general, just that the climate then created a very different environment for the sides. They didn't find such differences on abortion or black lives matter, its just immigration in a very special time.
But as others say here, using binary US politics in this kind of research makes little sense.
And thats your problem with science. We dont know how old these people are, we dont know the selection process, ie were they all recruited down the local Masonic Lodge, or at a University, or at a Church.
More data is needed on the recruitment processes in order to eliminate any selection or manipulation bias, otherwise am I watching a scientific magic show?
We dont know if these people are Early Adopters on the Everett Rogers Diffusion of innovations curve.
It might be better to title this study, fMRI used to map Social Conformity as studied by people like Solomon Asch or fMRI used to map Authority to Obedience as studied by people like Stanley Milgram and more recently Phillip Zimbardo, where the idea's/ideology are the authority.
Would that be fair?
Where could we find a definition to check that we were referring to the same thing?
Modern progressive anti-meritocracy people might be loud, but they are a small minority, even at Google at the height of progressivism there you would see pro-meritocracy views winning out strongly among developers. You also see it here, I feel most here on HN are pro meritocracy. There are some progressives around who go into every thread about the topic and post a lot, but meritocracy views and topics tend to get upvoted.