Who Can Deviate from the Party Line? Political Ideology Moderates Evaluation of Incongruent Policy Positions in Insula and Anterior Cingulate Cortex

Abstract

Political polarization at the elite level is a major concern in many contemporary democracies, which is argued to alienate large swaths of the electorate and prevent meaningful social change from occurring, yet little is known about how individuals respond to political candidates who deviate from the party line and express policy positions incongruent with their party affiliations. This experiment examines the neural underpinnings of such evaluations using functional MRI (fMRI). During fMRI, participants completed an experimental task where they evaluated policy positions attributed to hypothetical political candidates. Each block of trials focused on one candidate (Democrat or Republican), but all participants saw two candidates from each party in a randomized order. On each trial, participants received information about whether the candidate supported or opposed a specific policy issue. These issue positions varied in terms of congruence between issue position and candidate party affiliation. We modeled neural activity as a function of incongruence and whether participants were viewing ingroup or outgroup party candidates. Results suggest that neural activity in brain regions previously implicated in both evaluative processing and work on ideological differences (insula and anterior cingulate cortex) differed as a function of the interaction between incongruence, candidate type (ingroup versus outgroup), and political ideology. More liberal participants showed greater activation to incongruent versus congruent trials in insula and ACC, primarily when viewing ingroup candidates. Implications for the study of democratic representation and linkages between citizens' calls for social change and policy implementation are discussed.

Political neuroscience: Understanding how the brain makes political decisions

“…These findings may suggest that even when liberals and conservatives reach similar decisions, they may engage in different decision-making processes to reach those outcomes. These findings are consistent with prior work showing larger volume in right amygdala for conservatives (Kanai et al, 2011), and greater activation in insula for liberals in other tasks (Haas et al, 2017). Other work has found insula activation associated with more egalitarian decision making (Dawes et al, 2012).…”

“…Given that individuals who score higher on measures of system justification are also more likely to espouse conservative beliefs (for a review see Jost, Banaji, & Nosek, 2004), the amygdala findings across these studies appear to be consistent. While these findings with respect to brain POLITICAL NEUROSCIENCE 11 structure are consistent with work showing differences in emotional processing between liberals and conservatives (Haas, 2016a;Hibbing et al, 2014), as well as differences in conflict detection (Amodio, Jost, Master, & Yee, 2007;Haas, Baker, & Gonzalez, 2017;Weissflog, Choma, Dywan, van Noordt, & Segalowitz, 2013), it is important to note that the link between these structural differences and brain function has not yet been examined directly in this context.…”

A Psychology of Ideology: Unpacking the Psychological Structure of Ideological Thinking

“…The emerging field of political neuroscience (Haas, Warren, & Lauf, 2020;Jost, Nam, Amodio, & Van Bavel, 2014;Nam, 2020;Smith & Warren, 2020) has even revealed differences between political liberals and conservatives in their neurobiology (e.g. Amodio, Jost, Master, & Yee, 2007;Haas, Baker, & Gonzalez, 2017;Kanai, Feilden, Firth, & Rees, 2011;Nam et al, 2018;Oxley et al, 2008;Schreiber et al, 2013) and in their neural responses to affective (Carraro, Castelli, & Macchiella, 2011;Smith, Oxley, Hibbing, Alford, & Hibbing, 2011), facial (Vigil, 2010), and political content (Leong, Chen, Willer, & Zaki, 2020). Although this is far from an exhaustive review, most outlooks on the literature will conclude that when politically-opposed groups are compared based on self-categorizations of ideological affiliations, psychological differences between them do emerge.…”

Political Uncertainty Moderates Neural Evaluation of Incongruent Policy Positions

“…The analyses reported here rely on the same dataset we used for analyses published in Haas, Baker, and Gonzalez (31), but here we focus on uncertainty which was not included in as liberal and 26 identifying as conservative. Participants were recruited from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and surrounding community.…”

“…Each trial consisted of presentation of a cue (750 milliseconds) followed by a policy statement (4250 ms) and a jittered fixation cross (ISI: 2500, 5000, 7500, 10000, or 12500 ms). Policy statements were selected on the basis of pilot data (see 31), and participants saw each statement twice over the course of the experiment, but never the same issue twice for the same candidate. A majority of the issue positions (66.6%) in each block were congruent with the candidate's political identification (as determined by behavioral pilot data), but a smaller subset were incongruent with his identification (33.3% percent) to allow for examination of both congruent and incongruent issue positions.…”