Conservative and liberal attitudes drive polarized neural responses to political content — Yuan Chang Leong, Janice Chen, Robb Willer, and Jamil Zaki

Partisan biases in processing political information contribute to rising divisions in society. How do such biases arise in the brain? We measured the neural activity of participants watching videos related to immigration policy. Despite watching the same videos, conservative and liberal participants exhibited divergent neural responses. This “neural polarization” between groups occurred in a brain area associated with the interpretation of narrative content and intensified in response to language associated with risk, emotion, and morality. Furthermore, polarized neural responses predicted attitude change in response to the videos. These findings suggest that biased processing in the brain drives divergent interpretations of political information and subsequent attitude polarization.

PNAS
Conservative and liberal attitudes drive polarized neural responses to political content
Yuan Chang Leong, Janice Chen, Robb Willer, and Jamil Zaki