Emory Study Lights Up the Political Brain
I noted previously the ambivalence around recent proposals to classify 'extreme bias' as an official psychiatric diagnosis. Now, results from a new study conducted at Emory University appear to indicate that biased thought engages totally different neurological processes from those engaged in normal reasoning.
Researchers conducted a study in the lead up to the 2004 presidential election, using partisan Democrats and Republicans as their subjects. Subjects were assigned reasoning tasks that required evaluating threatening information about both their preferred candidate and the opposing candidate. Functional neuroimaging (fMRI) scans were used to determine which parts of the brain were activated during the exercises.From a behavioral perspective, subjects responded as predicted: partisans of either strip denied obvious contradictions for their own candidate that they had no difficulty detecting in the opposing candidate. No surprise there...
But the neural imaging indicated that in coming to such biased conclusions, the subjects were exercising parts of the brain involved in emotional processing, while areas associated with normal reasoning showed no significant activity.
While reasoning about apparent contradictions for their own candidate, partisans showed activations throughout the orbital frontal cortex, indicating emotional processing and presumably emotion regulation strategies. There also were activations in areas of the brain associated with the experience of unpleasant emotions, the processing of emotion and conflict, and judgments of forgiveness and moral accountability.
Notably absent were any increases in activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most associated with reasoning (as well as conscious efforts to suppress emotion). The finding suggests that the emotion-driven processes that lead to biased judgments likely occur outside of awareness, and are distinct from normal reasoning processes when emotion is not so heavily engaged... [emphasis mine]
This seems to demonstrate the extent to which our emotional investment in an issue, party or belief system can truly distort our thought processes — to the extent of shutting down normal reasoning altogether — without our awareness even that this is happening. The stronger our convictions, the harder it is for us to see that we are being led by our own prejudices.
No doubt the political classes have understood this intuitively for quite a long time. How easy it is for prejudicial thought patterns to be reinforced by simply pressing all the correct buttons. How hard it is for us to experience 'change of mind' (repentance, Gk: μετανοιαν) at the most fundamental level.
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