Turns out, we have partisan brains — but there’s hope

It’s no secret politics divides America. The growing hostility between Republicans who support Donald Trump and the Democrats who oppose him is fracturing friendships, families and churches. Each side wonders at the rationale of the other: “How can they possibly think that way?”

It turns out Republicans and Democrats do, in fact, think differently. When scientists in the emerging field of neuropolitics compared the brain scans of Republicans with those of Democrats, they found physical variations as well as differences in brain activity.

For help in understanding these findings, I reached out to Darren Schreiber at the University of Exeter, a pioneer in the field of political neuroscience and author of the book Your Brain is Built for Politics. Schreiber was the first to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the brain’s response to politics.

A standard MRI creates detailed images of the body using a powerful magnet, radio waves and computer processing. An fMRI detects neural activity by tracking the flow of oxygen-rich blood to neurons in the brain that need oxygen to fire.

“An MRI is like a picture, an fMRI is like a movie,” Schreiber said. “And we can see the blood flowing into different parts of the brain because we can see these little, tiny changes in the magnetic signal that tell us more blood is going to that area.”

What imaging found

When Schreiber examined the brains of Republicans and Democrats as they played a simple gambling game during an fMRI, he found remarkable differences between the brain activity of the two groups, even though the outcome of the game was the same for both.

“We have shown that these differences are strong enough that we can correctly classify somebody as Republican or Democrat with over 80% accuracy by looking at their brain activity while they’re doing that gambling task,” he said.

When Republican participants made risky decisions in the game, their brains displayed more activity in the right amygdala, a little almond shaped area located deep within the cerebral hemispheres. The amygdala detects danger and triggers the “fight, flight or freeze” response in animals. Additionally, it plays a role in feeling aggression, learning through reward and punishment, social hierarchy and the emotions certain memories evoke.

Political neuroscientists also have discovered the gray matter of the right amygdala is 10 mm³ larger in Republican brains than in the brains of Democrats. Although only slightly bigger than a sesame seed, the difference equates to thousands of neurons and possibly millions of neural synapses.

In contrast, Democrats who took a risk in the gambling game showed more neural activity in the left posterior insula. The insula, a prune-sized region of the brain’s cerebral cortex, is responsible for emotion, intuition, decision making and interoception (feeling internal body cues). It also enables individuals to perceive others as independent beings with their own beliefs, feelings and intentions.

What this means

So, does this mean Republicans are just overly fearful reactionaries and Democrats sensitive snowflakes?

“We can’t say, ‘Oh you’ve got an amygdala activation; therefore, you must be scared’. Because it could be a million other things that are causing your amygdala to have more activity at that particular moment,” Schreiber clarified. However, if a researcher exposes someone to scary stimuli, like the image of a snake, and their amygdala lights up in an fMRI, it’s clear the snake is responsible for the amygdala’s response.

What if that person spends a lot of time watching scary snakes? Would that exposure boost the size and reactivity of the amygdala?

“If I start talking about terrorism and bomb threats and crime, it makes everybody more conservative.”

“If I start talking about terrorism and bomb threats and crime, it makes everybody more conservative,” Schreiber said. “Conversely, if I say, ‘OK, imagine you’re Wonder Woman, you’ve got the bracelets of invincibility on, you’re totally strong, nothing can hurt you,’ people move to be more liberal … and that’s true for people on the left, people in the middle, (and) people on the right. People feel more liberal, more generous, more pro-social when they feel secure, safe, (like there’s) no threat.”

However, while members of both parties become more conservative when bombarded with fear-laden messaging, Republicans are more attuned to negative stimuli. When shown a series of images, they spend more time examining negative scenes and are better at recalling them.

Republicans also are more likely to interpret ambiguous faces as hostile. It’s possible these results, combined with exposure to stimuli like the fear-laden programming of Fox News and right-wing social media might activate the amygdala enough to eventually enlarge it.

Political neuroscientists have yet to test that theory in detail. Yet, when they measured the area of the brain responsible for spatial memory in London’s taxi drivers, they found the drivers’ hippocampi were enormous.

“When they did a follow-up study, they looked to see on the first day that somebody wanting to be a taxi driver went into the course, how big was their hippocampus, and three years later, does it change size? And it turns out it does,” Schreiber said. “We knew for a while that ‘neurons that fire together, wire together’ … and we now know that those neurons that are firing together and wiring together really do rewire your brain.”

This ability of the brain to change is called neuroplasticity.

Fear has the potential to physically change our brains. It also can change the way we see those around us.

“One of the things we see when people feel threatened is that they process the world differently.”

“One of the things we see when people feel threatened is that they process the world differently,” Schreiber said. “We can see brain activity differences of how people treat each other when they think that they’re an ‘us’ versus a ‘them.’”

Us versus them

Dividing the world into “us” and “them” influences how we make moral decisions. The fusiform gyrus in the brain recognizes faces and organizes them into categories such as “who to trust” or “who to be afraid of.” Researchers found that during economic scarcity, the fusiform gyrus in a white person’s brain does not properly visually encode Black faces as “face-like,” which caused white participants to allocate fewer resources to imaginary Black recipients.

Similarly, one of Schreiber’s own experiments revealed increased activity in the amygdalae of both Black and white individuals when viewing images of isolated Black faces. At the same time there was a decrease in the activity of the brain’s medial preferential cortex, the part of the default mode network where we do our thinking about social relationships.

Schreiber says this decrease happens when we view someone considered to be an “other.” They could be someone of a different race, an unhoused person or, theoretically, a member of a different political party. It’s important to note the reactions Schreiber saw in response to isolated Black faces came purely from internalized depictions of negative racial stereotypes, and not from a biological aversion to other races.

Political party affiliation has replaced race as America’s chief conflict.

Schreiber, who started out as a civil rights attorney in California before turning to neuroscience, says political party affiliation has replaced race as America’s chief conflict. According to a Pew Research poll, not only do Republicans and Democrats dislike the opposing party, they have a negative opinion of the people in that party, describing them as “more closed-minded, dishonest, immoral and unintelligent than other Americans.” This “affective polarization” is based solely on feelings rather than policy preferences.

In her book Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity, Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, reports both 30% of Republicans and 30% of Democrats believe members of the other party “lack the traits to be considered fully human — they behave like animals.” These responses stand in direct contrast to how people of faith should view one another.

Says Schreiber, “Martin Buber’s theology talks about ‘I’ and ‘Thou.’ Do I think of you as another spiritual entity, which is like me, or do I think of you like an object or threat that needs to be punished?”

Love your neighbor

Here, then, is the crux of our dilemma. Christians are called to love our neighbors as ourselves and see them as people made in God’s image. At the same time, we have amygdalae on the lookout for danger, societies that have evolved along with our brains to categorize neighbors into “us” and “them” and both media outlets and political parties happy to exploit our fears to drive us further apart. So, how do we heal the widening gap between Democrats and Republicans that’s tearing apart families, friendships and churches? Can our brains that got us into this mess help get us out?

Schreiber’s answer is a resounding and optimistic, “Yes!”

“Your brain is built for politics.”

When he first began looking into the interplay between politics and the human brain, he found that, for the politically engaged, thinking about national politics stimulates the default mode network we use for thinking about the interpersonal dynamics of family, the workplace or church. Speaking at TEDx London, he said: “Your brain is built for politics. The reason we have the very brains that we have is to solve the problems of being a political animal.”

Human brains are not hardwired to see only friend or foe, unlike ants that can tell at a sniff who is the enemy. Instead, our brains can navigate the complex and everchanging social dynamics of who is an “us” and who is a “them.” As much as the brain is wired to exclude, it’s also just as wired to include. We naturally want to find commonality and form coalitions.

“Very often when two people meet, they try to figure out (if) they have common ground,” Schreiber said. “Men characteristically will talk about sports teams, and they’ll use that in a kind of friendly identity/conflict way, but they’re establishing that they’re both sports fans.” Although we may think of our identities as fixed, they are in fact very malleable. “My identity in this context is as an academic, but with my wife I have a different identity, with my students I have a different identity.”

In his study of neural reactions to faces, Schreiber wasn’t comfortable showing subjects only the isolated images of Black faces, so he added photos of African Americans in positive social contexts. “When you see a Black family, your medial preferential cortex, your default mode network, increases in activity because you’re having empathy and sympathy. ‘Oh, how cute! The family’s out at Disneyland.’” In a tenth of a second, the brain quickly reconfigures a “them” into an “us.” Other studies prove interacting with diverse groups of people eventually reduces the amygdala’s responsiveness. The brain’s fusiform gyrus starts recognizing those diverse faces as “nonthreatening.”

Context and how we frame others can have a big impact on transforming the perceptions that divide us. “The Good Samaritan (is) the classic kind of taking a ‘them’ and making ‘them’ an ‘us,’” Schreiber said. The Samaritan “is somebody who is seen as a ‘them’ … and he is being framed as the person who helps the person on the side of the road. The Good Samaritan is the one who stops. That’s what we’re exhorted to do, not only to love our neighbor, but also to love our enemies. The ‘thems’ that are the ‘enemies,’ we can bring in, we need to bring in, to treat as an ‘us.’”

Synchrony

American psychologist Gordon Allport discovered how “they” become “us” while exploring racial segregation in the 1950s. He found when people have equal status, a common goal and a guarantee of equal treatment while they pursuit it, members of conflicting groups can work together to reduce prejudice. Since then, facilitators have successfully used Allport’s methods in 200 different countries to reconcile Jewish people and Nazis after World War II and the Hutu and Tutsi after the Rwandan genocide.

The reframing of “us” and “them” that comes from working together to achieve a common goal is the most effective means we have for overcoming division.

“This is the plot of all the science fiction movies. When the aliens invade, humanity (joins together and) fights them off,” Schreiber said. However, a big political divide within a congregation doesn’t necessarily mean a church needs to fight a “bigger alien” to achieve unity. Schreiber advises starting small.

“The very nature of ‘big’ is you get into the numbers, that utilitarian way of thinking, rather than the deontological personal way of thinking. When we think of ‘us’ we think, ‘This is the right thing to do, because it’s the right thing to do.’ When we think about ‘them,’ (it’s) ‘Well, let me check the budget.’”

Synchrony is another way our brains’ neural activity helps in creating a cohesive “us.”

As people engage in a common task, the neurons in the corresponding areas of each of their brains respond in similar ways. This synchronization occurs during social interactions, when members of a group deliberate before reaching consensus, and as concertgoers watch a musician perform. Researchers monitoring the brain waves of students found those who spent time socializing in pairs before class had more brain synchronicity during class and reported feeling closer to one another.

When I asked if the same would be true for a congregation worshipping together, Schreiber thought it “very likely.”

The heart of the gospel is God’s inclusivity. Working together, the early church overcame vast social, political and religious differences to share the good news. Healing our current political divisions won’t be easy, but understanding them is the first step toward reconciliation.

Studies show empathy itself is a catalyst for cooperation. Recognizing that the brains of Republicans and Democrats process the world differently helps us be more empathetic with one another. Just as our brains have become more partisan, we can train them to be more empathetic.

“If I practice my compassion, I practice my empathy, if I practice these things … if I keep firing those neurons together, they’re going to wire together,” Schreiber said.

Schreiber’s research gives him hope about the future, even if progress is slow and difficult at times.

“I think we are capable of thriving, we’re capable of making choices,” he said. “We’re not just stimulus response devices. There’s that gap between stimulus and response. And we can fill that with creative imagination. We can fill that with empathy and hope and love and a greater sense of purpose.”

 

Kristen Thomason is a freelance writer with a background in media studies and production. She has worked with national and international religious organizations and for public television. Currently based in Scotland, she has organized worship arts at churches in Metro D.C. and Toronto. In addition to writing for Baptist News Global, Kristen blogs on matters of faith and social justice at viaexmachina.com.

 

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