Political Leaning, Bias, and Brain Scans
Posted in Politics by George
I was listening to NPR this morning, and heard a report on what affects political polarization. The results were surprising:
Studies presented at the conference, for example, produced evidence that emotions and implicit assumptions often influence why people choose their political affiliations, and that partisans stubbornly discount any information that challenges their preexisting beliefs.
When self-described democrats and republicans were told to evaluate negative aspects of various candidates, they interestingly only pointed out negative information about candidates from the opposing party. On top of that, when presented negative information about candidates on their side of party lines, they found ways to discount that information.
These same people were in brain scanners while they were evaluating candidates. When they rejected negative information about the opposing candidate, reward centers in their brain were activated.
The psychologist observed that the way these subjects dealt with unwelcome information had curious parallels with drug addiction as addicts also reward themselves for wrong-headed behavior.
There were more studies mentioned that discussed bias against African Americans. Interestingly, in a study of 130,000 whites, those who showed bias against African Americans were much more likely to vote for president Bush in the last election.
Of course, we have to be careful in how precise we take information from brain scans to be, but these studies are very interesting and should be considered in politics today. Check out the Washington Post article I’ve been quoting and listen to the NPR audio if you’re interested.
August 1st, 2006 at 5:28 pm
I like the statement:
Interestingly, in a study of 130,000 whites, those who showed bias against African Americans were much more likely to vote for president Bush in the last election.
Wait, white racists are more likely to vote for Bush? I can’t believe it! In the 2004 election, white people tended to vote Republican (58/42) and black people tend to vote Democratic (11/88), on average. So, it would make sense that white racists would vote for Bush (against black trends) and mostly likely, black racists would vote for Kerry (against white trends).
Who’s shocked here? I hope no one conclude that Republican voters are inherently racist.
August 2nd, 2006 at 10:52 pm
Is there any stuff in these articles that talk about what causes the people to adopt their personal beliefs? I think it is fairly intuitive that people on different sides reward support for their own side, and totally block out views from opposition.
hm… also interesting stuff some random googling of one of the sociologists in the article
White people: explicitly and implicitly favored white people
Black people: explicity favored blacks and implicitly favored whites
http://www.apa.org/monitor/mar05/biased.html
So is explicit like thinking about something and then saying it? and implicit the original thought?
For example, they also talk about the idea of implicit beliefs on weight. So would implicit be the first idea like “eww…” and the explicit being the idea of “I really don’t want to insult the nice overweight guy next to me so, I’ll say it doesn’t matter too me”
Another article on one of the authors
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A270...
“The research has also upset notions of how prejudice can best be addressed. Through much of the 20th century, activists believed that biases were merely errors of conscious thought that could be corrected through education. This hopeful idea is behind the popularity of diversity training. But Banaji suggests such training relies on the wrong idea of how people form biases.”
Another point is that race bias does not equal racism in action. Training and education can take a bias and suppress the racist action.
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/
take the test and find out what
you are…. haha…this could be fun