Politically polarized brains share an intolerance of uncertainty

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-05/bu-ppb051321.php

 

News Release 13-May-2021
Brown University


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scientists at Brown University measured and compared the brain activity of committed partisans (both liberals and conservatives) as they watched real political debates and news broadcasts. In a recent study, they found that polarization was indeed exacerbated by intolerance of uncertainty: liberals with this trait tended to be more liberal in how they viewed political events, conservatives with this trait tended to be more conservative.

Yet the same neural mechanisms was at work, pushing the partisans into their different ideological camps.

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"We found that polarized perception -- ideologically warped perceptions of the same reality -- was strongest in people with the lowest tolerance for uncertainty in general," said van Baar, who is now a research associate at Trimbos, the Netherlands Institute of Mental Health and Addiction. "This shows that some of the animosity and misunderstanding we see in society is not due to irreconcilable differences in political beliefs, but instead depends on surprising -- and potentially solvable -- factors such as the uncertainty people experience in daily life."

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When the researchers analyzed participants' brain activity while processing the videos, they found that neural responses diverged between liberals and conservatives, reflecting differences in the subjective interpretation of the footage. People who identified strongly as liberal processed political content much in the same way and at the same time -- which the researchers refer to as neural synchrony. Likewise, the brains of those who identified as conservative were also in sync when processing political content.

"If you are a politically polarized person, your brain syncs up with like-minded individuals in your party to perceive political information in the same way," FeldmanHall said.

This polarized perception was exacerbated by the personality trait of intolerance of uncertainty. Those participants -- of any ideology -- who were less tolerant to uncertainty in daily life (as reported on their survey responses) had more ideologically polarized brain responses than those who are better able to tolerate uncertainty.

"This suggests that aversion to uncertainty governs how the brain processes political information to form black-and-white interpretations of inflammatory political content," the researchers wrote in the study.

Interestingly, the researchers did not observe the polarized perception effect during a non-political video or even during a video about abortion presented in a neutral, non-partisan tone.

"This is key because it implies that 'liberal and conservative brains' are not just different in some stable way, like brain structure or basic functioning, as other researchers have claimed, but instead that ideological differences in brain processes arise from exposure to very particular polarizing material," van Baar said. "This suggests that political partisans may be able to see eye to eye -- provided we find the right way to communicate."