Happy Thanksgiving, America! Meat gravy, vegan tofurky, arguing over politics?!?
This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science.
Meet clinical psychologist Drew Westen and colleagues at Emory University. They used functional neuroimaging—a type of MRI scan—on die-hard Democrats and Republicans.
They watched different brain areas become active, or shut down, when subjects were shown mostly negative information about political candidates.
When strongly partisan voters read negative info about their enemies, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex—where reasoning occurs—lit up! Showed bad news about their own candidate? Reasoning centers stayed quiet, and emotional regions kicked into overdrive. They literally couldn’t believe anything bad about their own candidates.
Just another smarty pants fact to thrill your family with—no matter how many donkeys or elephants in the room.
Reference: Westen, D., Blagov, P. S., Harenski, K., Kilts, C., & Hamann, S. (2006). Neural bases of motivated reasoning: an FMRI study of emotional constraints on partisan political judgment in the 2004 U.S. Presidential election. Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 18(11), 1947–1958. https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn.2006.18.11.1947