If you’ve been watching the intense partisan divide over the killing of Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minnesota this week, it’s likely felt as though different Americans are living in completely separate realities.
As it turns out, neuroscience might be able to explain why. In a new study whose findings will surprise absolutely no one who’s endured a fiery holiday dinner debate, researchers discovered that conservative and liberal brains don’t just arrive at fundamentally different conclusions, but take strikingly different paths to get there. It’s a fascinating piece of research which just might explain something about the yawning political divides currently tearing society apart.
The study, published in the journal PLOS One, explored why people rely on different types of evidence when explaining why things happen. Specifically, the paper’s authors at the University of Idaho sought to find why some people look for tons of high-level statistical information, while others are happy to listen to anecdotes or single authority figures to reach political conclusions.
In order to carry out the study, researchers recruited 583 adults from the US, who each took a political ideology survey as well as a test to measure their level of “cognitive reflection,” which measures the capacity to look past a knee-jerk response and engage in factual analysis.
Each participant was then given a fictional scenario about cash bail, a “pay-to-leave-jail” policy which critics say unjustly punishes the poor.
The participants were told that, out of the top 300 US cities by population, 100 had ended cash bail. They were then asked to evaluate whether the policy was “effective at reducing crime” based on 10 pieces of evidence. Each piece of information was either composed of statistical figures or testimony from political “experts” from groups like the Democratic Party, Republican Party, and the National Rifle Association, in order to measure which type of evidence each one gravitated toward.
Participants had the chance to go through as many bits of evidence as they wanted before they delivered their final analysis to the researchers — though not all took advantage of this. For example, the researchers found that the probability a participant would rely on a single data point for their conclusion rose from about 4 percent for “very liberal” people to over 37 percent for “very conservative” folks.
As the researchers concluded, those on the left “tend to be more likely to consult a comprehensive set of statistical data relative to those on the right.”
Outside of the left-right paradigm, those who scored high on the cognitive reflection test were more likely to compare and contrast all available statistical data to form their conclusions than those who scored lower.
“Importantly, our study shows that two major individual-level variables help to predict what type of ‘evidence seeker’ a given person is: whether or not they are ‘cognitively reflected’ and whether or not they are liberal/conservative,” the study’s lead author and professor of politics and philosophy at the University of Idaho Florian Justwan told PsyPost.
“Indeed, people’s political beliefs influence how they look for information (often without them realizing it),” Justwan continued.
Zooming out, the research adds to a body of work which suggests that left-leaning people have more trust in the scientific method than conservatives. While that isn’t exactly a bombshell revelation, it does paint an interesting picture of how people one both sides of the aisle come to their political conclusions.
Said another way: while the research surely won’t end the culture war bickering at Thanksgiving, it gives us a strong explanation why one person’s “obvious proof” is another person’s fake news — a fundamental rift which, if ever resolved, could completely change the political landscape.
More on brain studies: Social Media Is Absolutely Nuking Children’s Brains, New Research Finds