Adventures in brains: Liberal ones may not be like conservative ones

Brains 25¢!

AI can predict your political ideology using just a brain scan:

A deep learning AI running on a supercomputer was able to link patterns of brain connectivity to political ideology.

• The AI was about 70% accurate, which is roughly equivalent to predicting a person's political beliefs based on their parents' ideology.

• While the study certainly is stimulating, it's essentially pattern-hunting with big data. Revealing the neurological roots of ideology will be much harder.

Scientists have used brain scanning techniques to delve into the neuroscientific underpinnings of political beliefs before. For example, researchers have found previously that conservatives tend to have more gray matter volume in their amygdala (a region associated with fear, anxiety, and aggression), while liberals tend to have more in their anterior cingulate cortex (tied to, among other things, ethics and morality). Another experiment showed that the brains of liberals and conservatives react differently to “charged” words in political videos.

In the current study, the researchers observed and recorded functional connectivity in the brains of 174 healthy young adult subjects as they performed various simple tasks, such as pressing a pop-up button as quickly as possible for a monetary reward, pairing names with faces, or answering true/false questions about a story they had just read. Subjects also had their brains scanned in a resting state — awake and relaxed, with their eyes closed.

Measuring functional connectivity (FC) is somewhat rare in political neuroscience. FC refers to how different parts of the brain can concurrently show similar activity, as if they are communicating with each other. The researchers utilized a state-of-the-art AI deep learning technique called BrainNetCNN, running on supercomputers at the Ohio Supercomputer Center, to analyze the functional connectivity data from all of the tasks and to correlate them with the subjects’ self-reported political ideology, which was scored on a one to six scale from very liberal to very conservative.

While the study certainly is stimulating, it is essentially pattern-hunting with big data. That’s fine, but a model is only robust and widely applicable if it is based on a large, diverse study group. In this case, the subjects were all young adults, seven out of ten of whom were liberal. So the model may not work if tested on other Americans (or people, in general). Moreover, the AI cannot tell us anything about the neurological roots of ideology; it wasn’t designed to do so. Answering that will be a much taller task.

This is another suggestion, not proof, that there are fundamental differences in liberal compared to conservative brains. If this data could be confirmed and the underlying neurology better understood in bigger studies and different studies, that might point to ways to increase the relative power of messaging based on fact, truth and sound reasoning (honest speech) compared to lies, falsehoods and crackpot motivated reasoning (dark speech, free and unfree). 

Personal thoughts

A personal estimate is that if one says for the sake of argument that the power to persuade, evoke true beliefs and evoke corresponding overt behavior is X, it feels reasonably accurate to think that dark speech has about 3X power to persuade, evoke false beliefs and evoke corresponding overt behavior. That estimate or intuition is based on hints in the data that conservatives might be responsive to triggers to fear, anxiety, and aggression, while liberals may be more responsive to  triggers to ethics and morality. 

The reason I'm interested in possible ways to better understand messaging and how to boost the power of honest speech to elicit beliefs and behaviors, e.g., voting vs. not voting. A basic assumption I base that on is that, in my firm opinion, it is usually better for politics, political outcomes and civilized social progress for most people to believe and act based on honest speech than on dark speech. That accords with my limited knowledge of history and my lifetime of experiences with politics. 

If I am right, then finding ways to elevate the power of honest speech relative to dark speech just might be a factor in reducing the odds of destruction of modern civilization, or on a really bad day, self-annihilation and extinction of the human species. Of course, all of that is also just personal opinion.

I doubt that more than maybe ~10% of adults would disagree with that personal belief. Those who would agree, probably ascribe, consciously or not, to a moral value that the means justify the ends, including using dark speech to deceive and manipulate. Where the currently intractable liberal vs. conservative disagreement lies is in what is fact, truth and sound reasoning and what isn't. The rank and file on both sides firmly believe they usually or almost always rely on honest speech, while the opposition does not. 

Hence my belief in the importance of understanding the neurology of political ideology and the nature and frailty of honest speech (as PD discussed here a couple of days ago) compared to dark speech. If the advantage of the demagogue wielding dark speech relative to a speaker with weaker honest speech could be mostly neutralized, the odds of better outcomes arguably increase somewhat.

Most conservatives will quite probably reject that characterization of the conservative brain and possible neurology as nonsense. Maybe in time those criticisms will be vindicated and those inconvenient possibilities eliminated by reliable data. So in the meantime, we're still stuck with fascinating possibilities but not yet able to draw firm, data-based conclusions. We still don't know about the neurology of political ideology. We also still don't know if it is even possible to empower honest speech so it is at least fairly close to par with dark speech, assuming honest is less powerful than dark. 

One thing we do know. America will remain awash for years or decades in radical right dark speech from trusted but immoral, corrupt Republican elites. That is just not going to change. Maybe that alone is a barrier that any tactic or form of honest speech can never overcome. If so, I'm barking up the wrong tree.

That's where I left that darned thing

Acknowledgment: Thanks to Larry Motuz for point out this article -- it gave me a chance to talk about what this blog is about