Intolerance of uncertainty modulates brain-to-brain synchrony during politically polarized perception.

ABSTRACT: Political partisans see the world through an ideologically biased lens. What drives political polarization? Although it has been posited that polarization arises because of an inability to tolerate uncertainty and a need to hold predictable beliefs about the world, evidence for this hypothesis remains elusive. We examined the relationship between uncertainty tolerance and political polarization using a combination of brain-to-brain synchrony and intersubject representational similarity analysis, which measured committed liberals' and conservatives' (n = 44) subjective interpretation of naturalistic political video material. Shared ideology between participants increased neural synchrony throughout the brain during a polarizing political debate filled with provocative language but not durin

SUBMITTER: van Baar JM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8157931 | biostudies-literature | 2021 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature