Brain scans remarkably good at predicting political ideology

EurekAlert ^ | 06/02/2022 | OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

[aimhigh]

Brain scans of people taken while they performed various tasks – and even did nothing – accurately predicted whether they were politically conservative or liberal, according to the largest study of its kind.

Researchers found that the “signatures” in the brain revealed by the scans were as accurate at predicting political ideology as the strongest predictor generally used in political science research, which is the ideology of a person’s parents. . . .

In fact, even when participants were asked to sit quietly and think of nothing in particular, the resulting scans showed a relationship to political ideology, said co-author James Wilson, assistant professor of psychiatry and biostatistics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. “Even without any stimulus at all, functional connectivity in the brain can help us predict a person’s political orientation,” Wilson said.

[dfwgator]

BS. We all know liberals have no brains.

[Obadiah]

Yeah, if there’s brain activity your a conservative. If there’s no brain activity you’re a liberal.

[Scrambler Bob]

It’s easy, they go by volume.

[Tell It Right]

If you have more activity in the right half of your brain than the left half, you're a liberal.

If you're a left-brained thinker, you're a conservative.

[Tench_Coxe]

That’s why it was accurate. In all tasks, liberal showed no brain activity.

[dsrtsage]

Pretty light on conclusions though at one point they seemed to imply that conservatives had no empathy for the poor and suffering

[seowulf]

Genetic Influences on Political Ideologies: Twin Analyses of 19 Measures of Political Ideologies from Five Democracies and Genome-Wide Findings from Three Populations

Almost forty years ago, evidence from large studies of adult twins and their relatives suggested that between 30-60% of the variance in social and political attitudes could be explained by genetic influences.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4038932/

[dfwgator]

Liberal Brain..

[BitWielder1]

Zombies can do that: ... brains ... brains ... liberal, ugh, ... brains ...

[dfwgator]

[Steely Tom]

Pretty light on conclusions though at one point they seemed to imply that conservatives had no empathy for the poor and suffering

Mathematics and logic have no empathy for the poor and suffering, which is why they've been identified as "thinking White" and are being eliminated from the education system.

[Sacajaweau]

Ideology is in the heart you bunch of ............

[BitWielder1]

... who performed standard tasks often used in scientific experiments ...

What was the correlation with how well they performed on those tasks?

[rlmorel]

I have always found these hilarious and accurate:

And of course, if Trump is actually going to read those brain scans, it would look like this:

[usurper]

BS. We all know liberals have no brains.

They have brains, the scans simply result in a diagnosis of Abby Normal.

[katana]

Simply a measure of presence or absence of an echo.

[rlmorel]

That last one was Radiology humor...:)

[Ransomed]

Facial recognition is supposedly also very good at political orientation and crime prediction. In fact, that it can predict crime so accurately might actually keep it from widespread implementation in the west, because the results aren’t going to coincide with the dominate politically correct thinking.

FReegards

[whitney69]

By the appearance of voting history, how can you measure what isn’t there to make a comparison? And that space is universal.

wy69