Do socialists have brains?
The study; According to a news article, hot off the press in this month’s Psychologist, Colin Firth has co-authored a neuroimaging study and resulting paper investigating difference in brain structure according to political inclination. Rees from UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience took brain-scans of a Tory and Labour politician. The study was then extended to comparing the brain-scans of first 90 participants, and then 20 further.
The results; Well, the trends that were spotted were those with more Liberal leanings had thicker tissue in the ‘anterior cingulate’ and those with Tory tendencies had a bigger ‘right amygdala’. Interestingly, on the last 20 tested, the investigators could predict the political directions of the participants by looking at the scan with 72% accuracy.
The analysis; does the size and shape of different areas of the brain dictate our political opinions? If so this could have potentially huge implications - could politicians be in fact powerless over the views of the electorate? Would the traditional right vs left nature of politics be dropped in favour of responding more directly to shifting desires, markets and needs? In fact, could this explain why a coalition appears to please no-one?
The other alternative; do our political leanings actually alter the size and shape of the brain? This powerful overlap between our personality, identity and idea of ‘self’ and our physical existence and anatomy rings clear if this is the case.
The conclusion; what this study actually means, if anything, is yet to be seen and of course whether it will actually have any difference on our political systems and the crowd psychology that becomes obvious upon election time is debatable. While I will certainly keep an eye on further research in this area, do let me know if anyone has anything to add.
The blogability: This study could not show more perfectly the overlap between psychology on a personal level, sociology as we interact as a country, and politics as the country is led in one direction over another.
This is very interesting research. I’m not sure that the study is large enough to assure us that either of the possibilities proposed are true, but the implications are certainly massive! I do think, however, that a weakness of this kind of research is that it’s very difficult to pigeonhole people into ‘Liberal’ or ‘Conservative’ these days. I myself am financially Conservative, but I can see the merits of a number of Liberal social policies. Still, good stuff!
