Here is an article from Scientific American that discusses the red blue divide as it relates to the brain:
www.scientificamerican.com
I was particularly interested in the notion that the other side may not hate us as much as we think as well as the irony of trying to bring that idea to the fore in a place like P & N.
But I also find this section to support my own theory, not original with me. that political party identification is there as a device to conceal from ourselves our own self hate:
"Motivated reasoning, in which people work hard to justify their opinions or decisions, even in the face of conflicting evidence, has been a popular topic in political neuroscience because there is a lot of it going around. While partisanship plays a role, motivated reasoning goes deeper than that. Just as most of us like to think we are good-hearted human beings, people generally prefer to believe that the society they live in is desirable, fair and legitimate. “Even if society isn’t perfect, and there are things to be criticized about it, there is a preference to think that you live in a good society,” Nam says. When that preference is particularly strong, she adds, “that can lead to things like simply rationalizing or accepting long-standing inequalities or injustices.” Psychologists call the cognitive process that lets us do so “system justification.”
Nam and her colleagues set out to understand which brain areas govern the affective processes that underlie system justification. They found that the volume of gray matter in the amygdala is linked to the tendency to perceive the social system as legitimate and desirable. Their interpretation is that “this preference to system justify is related to these basic neurobiological predispositions to be alert to potential threats in your environment,” Nam says.
After the original study, Nam’s team followed a subset of the participants for three years and found that their brain structure predicted the likelihood of whether they participated in political protests during that time. “Larger amygdala volume is associated with a lower likelihood of participating in political protests,” Nam says. “That makes sense in so far as political protest is a behavior that says, ‘We’ve got to change the system.’”
Understanding the influence of partisanship on identity, even down to the level of neurons, “helps to explain why people place party loyalty over policy, and even over truth,” argued psychologists Jay Van Bavel and Andrea Pereira, both then at New York University, in Trends in Cognitive Sciences in 2018. In short, we derive our identities from both our individual characteristics, such as being a parent, and our group memberships, such as being a New Yorker or an American. These affiliations serve multiple social goals: they feed our need to belong and desire for closure and predictability, and they endorse our moral values. And our brain represents them much as it does other forms of social identity."
Hahahaha: Social goals that feed our need to belong, our desire for closure and predictability, that endorse our moral values are, in my opinion, symptoms of something deeper that is people will not look at, that we have those needs because we do not have what it takes to fulfill them, our own true and real self respect. We feel worthless, the worst in the world actually, and have a need never to know that is what we really feel. It isn't reason and intelligence that guides us, but a motivation never to know what we feel and find something somewhere else, out there that can never really fill up the void that we feel within.
Conservative and Liberal Brains Might Have Some Real Differences
Scanners try to watch the red-blue divide play out underneath the skull
I was particularly interested in the notion that the other side may not hate us as much as we think as well as the irony of trying to bring that idea to the fore in a place like P & N.
But I also find this section to support my own theory, not original with me. that political party identification is there as a device to conceal from ourselves our own self hate:
"Motivated reasoning, in which people work hard to justify their opinions or decisions, even in the face of conflicting evidence, has been a popular topic in political neuroscience because there is a lot of it going around. While partisanship plays a role, motivated reasoning goes deeper than that. Just as most of us like to think we are good-hearted human beings, people generally prefer to believe that the society they live in is desirable, fair and legitimate. “Even if society isn’t perfect, and there are things to be criticized about it, there is a preference to think that you live in a good society,” Nam says. When that preference is particularly strong, she adds, “that can lead to things like simply rationalizing or accepting long-standing inequalities or injustices.” Psychologists call the cognitive process that lets us do so “system justification.”
Nam and her colleagues set out to understand which brain areas govern the affective processes that underlie system justification. They found that the volume of gray matter in the amygdala is linked to the tendency to perceive the social system as legitimate and desirable. Their interpretation is that “this preference to system justify is related to these basic neurobiological predispositions to be alert to potential threats in your environment,” Nam says.
After the original study, Nam’s team followed a subset of the participants for three years and found that their brain structure predicted the likelihood of whether they participated in political protests during that time. “Larger amygdala volume is associated with a lower likelihood of participating in political protests,” Nam says. “That makes sense in so far as political protest is a behavior that says, ‘We’ve got to change the system.’”
Understanding the influence of partisanship on identity, even down to the level of neurons, “helps to explain why people place party loyalty over policy, and even over truth,” argued psychologists Jay Van Bavel and Andrea Pereira, both then at New York University, in Trends in Cognitive Sciences in 2018. In short, we derive our identities from both our individual characteristics, such as being a parent, and our group memberships, such as being a New Yorker or an American. These affiliations serve multiple social goals: they feed our need to belong and desire for closure and predictability, and they endorse our moral values. And our brain represents them much as it does other forms of social identity."
Hahahaha: Social goals that feed our need to belong, our desire for closure and predictability, that endorse our moral values are, in my opinion, symptoms of something deeper that is people will not look at, that we have those needs because we do not have what it takes to fulfill them, our own true and real self respect. We feel worthless, the worst in the world actually, and have a need never to know that is what we really feel. It isn't reason and intelligence that guides us, but a motivation never to know what we feel and find something somewhere else, out there that can never really fill up the void that we feel within.
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