Nonpolitical images evoke neural predictors of political ideology.

ABSTRACT: Political ideologies summarize dimensions of life that define how a person organizes their public and private behavior, including their attitudes associated with sex, family, education, and personal autonomy. Despite the abstract nature of such sensibilities, fundamental features of political ideology have been found to be deeply connected to basic biological mechanisms that may serve to defend against environmental challenges like contamination and physical threat. These results invite the provocative claim that neural responses to nonpolitical stimuli (like contaminated food or physical threats) should be highly predictive of abstract political opinions (like attitudes toward gun control and abortion). We applied a machine-learning method to fMRI data to test the hypotheses that brain re

SUBMITTER: Ahn WY 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4245707 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature