Credit: Getty Images
Jan Kremláček,1,* Daniel Musil,2 Jana Langrová,1 and Martin Palecek2
Author information Article notes Copyright and License information PMC Disclaimer
Abstract
A previous experiment showed that there was a strong correlation between conservatism/liberalism and brain activity, linked to an error response (r = 0.59, p < 0.001) in the USA political environment. We re-ran the experiment on a larger and age-homogeneous group (n = 100, 50 females and 50 males, aged 20–26 years) in the Czech Republic; a European country with a different sociocultural environment and history. We did not find a relationship between the brain activity connected to conflict monitoring and self-reported conservatism/liberalism orientation (ρ = −0.11, p = 0.297) or conservatism/liberalism validated for the USA agenda (ρ = −0.01, p = 0.910). Instead of replicating the previous study, we decided to test the hypothesis under a different socio-cultural context. Our results support a view of self-reported or validated, conservative or liberal attitudes as a complex behavioral pattern. Such a behavioral pattern cannot be determined with statistical significance, using a simple Go-NoGo detection task, without accounting for confounding factors such as age and socio-cultural conditions. Sufficiently powered studies are warranted to evaluate this neuro-political controversy.
Keywords: error related negativity, political attitude, liberalism, conservatism, neuropolitics
Introduction
Political orientation significantly affects behavior and decision making on an individual and social level. Increasingly there are attempts to describe the factors that shape political orientation across anthropological directions with political neuroscience (Jost et al., 2014). Neuroscientific methods with objective measurements can verify or generate hypotheses related to the political orientation with conservative stance, characterized by closeness and holding tradition vs. a liberal orientation associated with openness and bringing about a change in the order (Jost and Amodio, 2012). Several studies advocating a strong correlation between neurocognitive settings and political preference continues to increase over time (for review, see Schreiber, 2017).
A recent study (Amodio et al., 2007), hereinafter referred to as Am2007, demonstrated that a person’s self-reported political attitude may be closely linked to a neural correlate accompanying a repeated error response, the error related negativity (ERN), in a simple laboratory detection task. The authors found a statistically significant relationship between the amplitude of the ERN and self-evaluation on the liberalism/conservatism (L/C) axis. They demonstrated that participants who presented a higher degree of liberalism in their answers had a larger ERN amplitude, and this fact was interpreted as a higher sensitivity to incentives for change to established rules.
The ERN represents a negative component of event related potentials (ERP) culminating above the medial-frontal cortex, about 50 ms after the moment of an error response (Gehring et al., 2012). Probable neural origins of ERN are localized in the frontomedial cortex, the anterior and rostral cingulate cortex, and the adjacent supplementary motor cortex (Iannaccone et al., 2015), as was also demonstrated by intracortical recordings (Brázdil et al., 2005). The ERN, characterized as a response to conflict, is behavior- and context- dependent. The ERN changes with several factors, such as personal characteristics, psychopathology, age, condition of neurotransmitters (diet, previous experiences) or relationship to the task being performed (Gehring et al., 2012; Larson et al., 2014). As is the case for other ERP, ERN is sensitive to the various aforementioned factors; however, its behavioral interpretation is difficult, as an undistinguishable ERN change may be caused by different conditions. Therefore, we found the results explaining political ideology, by considering ERN (Amodio et al., 2007; Jost and Amodio, 2012; Weissflog et al., 2013; Jost et al., 2014) appealing, and we decided to test if the results are robust with respect to different sociocultural environments. We attempted to replicate the results of the previous Am2007 study in the Czech Republic—a democratic country with a communistic history (1948–1989), in which self-evaluation of L/C need not correspond to the general political orientation. To account for different environmental and historical conditions, we calibrated political preferences according to the values associated with a typical agenda of US liberalism and conservatism in addition to the self-report. We expected to verify the extent to which the original hypothesis of correlation between neurological setting and political preference is specific to the self-reported L/C and US environment.
More at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/