Glaucon wrote:
Scientists say they can predict with 95 percent accuracy where youll fall on the liberal-conservative spectrum by showing you just one picture and then studying how your brain responds to the image. Furthermore, studies show that political orientation may be as inheritance-based as height.
According to New Scientist, increasing evidence indicates that the sense of disgust is closely aligned with a persons political orientation. People who land on the conservative end of the spectrum have a more easily aroused sense of disgust than their liberal counterparts.
A team of scientists at Virginia Tech led by researcher Read Montague found that people who are more likely to sit on the right side of the political spectrum have a higher sensitivity to d********g pictures like bodily waste, gore or the remains of dead animals.
These individuals also showed a greater preoccupation with ideas of bodily and spiritual purity and as a result tended to oppose things they view as unclean like same-sex marriage and a******n.
In their study published Thursday in the Cell Press journal Current Biology Montagues team took a group of 83 volunteers and performed fMRI brain imaging scans on them as the test subjects viewed a series of images. Some were d********g, others threatening. Some were neutral and others pleasant.
After the images of their brain activity were recorded, the volunteers answered a questionnaire about a series of social and political issues, asking them to rate themselves on a continuum from very liberal to very conservative.
In a press release about the study, Montague said, A single d********g image was sufficient to predict each subjects political orientation. I havent seen such clean predictive results in any other functional imaging experiments in our lab or others.
When confronted with d********g images, the people who classified themselves as conservatives showed increased brain activity in brain regions associated with disgust the basal ganglia and amygdala as well as in a complex network of regions involved in emotional self-control, information processing and attention. Liberals showed increased activity in their own brains, but in a diverse array of areas.
In fact, Montague told New Scientist, the responses in the brain are so strong that we can predict with 95 per cent accuracy where youll fall on the liberal-conservative spectrum by showing you just one picture. This was surprising as there are no other reports where peoples response to just one stimulus predicts anything behaviorally interesting.
The teams findings also indicate that since the structure and function of these areas of the brain are almost entirely determined by genetics, political leanings may be something we mostly inherit from our parents, just as much as height and hair color.
Scientists say they can predict with 95 percent a... (
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I was born an American period. I believe in going forward not backwards. Just like in my truck(D) for forward, (R) for reverse. It really is that simple. :thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup: