Conservative and liberal attitudes drive polarized neural responses to political content.

ABSTRACT: People tend to interpret political information in a manner that confirms their prior beliefs, a cognitive bias that contributes to rising political polarization. In this study, we combined functional magnetic resonance imaging with semantic content analyses to investigate the neural mechanisms that underlie the biased processing of real-world political content. We scanned American participants with conservative-leaning or liberal-leaning immigration attitudes while they watched news clips, campaign ads, and public speeches related to immigration policy. We searched for evidence of "neural polarization": activity in the brain that diverges between people who hold liberal versus conservative political attitudes. Neural polarization was observed in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC), a

SUBMITTER: Leong YC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7959490 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature