Summary and Critique
Conservatives and liberals portray diverse mental styles, and joining lines of proof shows that biology impacts variances in their radical beliefs, psychological characteristics, and attitudes. For example, conservatives portray more powerful attitudinal responses of conflict and threat. On the other hand, liberals seek out uncertainty and novelty. Besides, democrats who are liberal take risks more than their Republican counterparts who are politically are conventional. The ideological differences they possess have been contributed by psychological, logical, and social constraints that have primarily focused on the individual rule partialities rather than biological variances in the evaluative progressions. Research instead shows physiological interrelationships between conflict and risk by conservatives and the liberals (Schreiber, Fonzo, Simmons, Dawes, Flagan, Fowler, & Paulus, 2013). Conservatives possess more powerful physical responses to negative stimuli than liberals. On the contrary, liberals have stouter physiological reactions to occurrences of mental conflict than the conservatives. The article shows the functional responses to conflict and threat by conservatives and liberals through exploring the neural processes while making risky decisions is a necessary trait to help understand the relationship between the political processes and the mental processes.
Kanai and colleagues found out that four brain regions differ among the liberals and conservatives. These have further supported and proved that the political system could be linked to mental processes’ variances. The structures are the right temporal lobe, anterior cingulate, the left insula, and the right amygdala (Schreiber et al., 2013). In terms of making risky decisions, the amygdala processes emotional attributes present in decision making. The insular setting represents the internal body in cues important for particular sensation states in beckoning prospective changes in interceptive conditions to likely decision-related results. Kanai et al. show the same regions implicated in conflict and risk in the mental processes where the liberals and conservatives differ. Kanai et al. suggested that when changes in cognitive function occur, there can be brain structure changes. The study revealed that inherited variances had been shown to contribute to variations in political ideologies.
Though hereditary disparity has contributed to variations in political philosophy and the power of prejudice activity in the insula and the amygdala, it is immense, thereby suggesting that acting as prejudice in a biased atmosphere may affect the brain’s normal functioning beyond and above the result of heredity. The relationship between environmental and genetic impact could also drive the correlations between the political affiliation and the brain regions. Moreover, unraveling the party roles, genes, ideology, and neurocognition will be necessary to advance our knowledge of behavior and political approaches. The capability to forecast party identification by neural activities during a risk-taking duty proposes that finding the primary neuropsychological variances between partisans would give more important intuitions than the traditional tools of political science, sociology, and psychology.
From the study, it was evident that the brain can adjust to respond to the atmosphere, which could also mean that we can change our minds. Further, the article stresses that the Red Brain, Blue Brain’s study, does not entail showing individuals are hereditarily hardwired to be democrats or republicans. Instead, the brain function models offer an 82.9% precision rate predicting whether a person is a republican or a democrat. One of the most positive and nuanced upshots of the study suggests that the different ideologies shape rather than the naturally pre-determined to think and act in a particular way. The course does well than previous models, which entirely depend on the brain structure or a parent’s party affiliation. However, the article could have further been made better by showing how the mental processes and political preferences are interrelated.
References
Schreiber, D., Fonzo, G., Simmons, A. N., Dawes, C. T., Flagan, T., Fowler, J. H., & Paulus, M. P. (2013). Red brain, blue brain: Evaluative processes differ in Democrats and Republicans. PLoS One, 8(2), e52970. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0052970