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→The causes in the light of brain research
Jost at al, summarizing a 50 years of research on the causes of conservatism had suggested that the two main casus of conservatism are fear and a feel of urgent<ref>[http://faculty.virginia.edu/haidtlab/jost.glaser.political-conservatism-as-motivated-social-cog.pdf Jost, J., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A., & Sulloway, F. J. (2003). Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129(3), 339–375.]</ref>. These findings where partly supported by new evidences that comes from the emerging field of political-brain research.
These findings showed show that there are some differences in the way brains of conservatives and liberals work. People with chronic state of conservatism are characterized by smaller anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and enlarged amygdala<ref>[http://amodiolab.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Jost-Amodio-2012.pdf Jost, J., & Amodio, D. (2012). Political ideology as motivated social cognition: Behavioral and neuroscientific evidence. Motiv Emot, 36, 55–64.]</ref> <ref>[http://blog.psico.edu.uy/cibpsi/files/2011/04/brains.pdf Kanai, R., Feilden, T., Firth, C., & Rees, G. (2011). Political orientations are correlated with brain structure in young adults. Current biology : CB, 21(8), 677–80. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2011.03.017]</ref>. The amygdala is involved social learning, and especially fear conditioning <ref>LeDoux, J. E. (1992). Brain mechanisms of emotion and emotional learning. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 2(2), 191–197. doi:10.1016/0959-4388(92)90011-9</ref><ref>LeDoux, J. (2004). The Emotional Brain, Fear, and the Amygdala. Cellular and Molecular Neurobiology, 23(4-5), 727–738. doi:10.1023/A:1025048802629</ref>. People with larger amygdala volume correlates positively with both the size (the number of contacts a person has) and the social complexity (the number of different groups to which a person belongs)<ref>Bickart, K. C., Wright, C. I., Dautoff, R. J., Dickerson, B. C., & Barrett, L. F. (2011). Amygdala volume and social network size in humans. Nature neuroscience, 14(2), 163–4. doi:10.1038/nn.2724</ref>. The other implications of enlarged amygdala are that conservatives having enlarged amygdala will be more sensitive to threat<ref>[http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0052970 Schreiber, D., Simmons, A., Dawes, C., Flagan, T., Fowler H., J., & Paulus, M. (2009). Red Brain, Blue Brain: Evaluative Processes Differ in Democrats and Republicans.]</ref>. Conservatives detect threatening faces more easily, with less effort<ref>Giuseffi, K. (2012). Processing Facial Emotions: An EEG Study of the Differences between Conservatives and Liberals and Across Political Participation. University of Nebraska.</ref>. Conservatives are more easily disgusted than liberals<ref>Inbar, Y., Pizarro, D. A., & Bloom, P. (2009). Conservatives are more easily disgusted than liberals. Cognition and Emotion, 23(4), 714–725.</ref>. This may explain the finding that Individuals with measurably higher physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support conservatives policies like defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism, and the Iraq War, whereas individuals displaying measurably lower physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favor liberals politics such as foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism, and gun control<ref>Oxley, D. R., Smith, K. B., Alford. John R., Hibbing, M. V., Miller, J. L., Scalora, M., Hatemi, P. K., et al. (2008). Political Attitudes Vary with Physiological Traits. Science, 321, 1667–1670.</ref>.
The [[ACC]], which is more active in liberals, is involved in conflict detection<ref>Botvinick, M. M., Cohen, J. D., & Carter, C. S. (2004). Conflict monitoring and anterior cingulate cortex: an update. Trends in cognitive sciences, 8(12), 539–546.</ref>, and it is a major player in the process of creating novel knowledge when people are puzzled <ref>Holroyd, C. B., & Yeung, N. (2011). An integrative theory of anterior cingulate cortex function: Option selection in hierarchical reinforcement learning. The Neural Basis of Motivational and Cognitive Control, 333–349.</ref><ref>Holroyd, C. B., & Yeung, N. (2012). Motivation of extended behaviors by anterior cingulate cortex. Trends in cognitive sciences, 16(2), 122–128.</ref>. Liberals having larger ACC and therefore we may expect that liberals are better in conflict detection. This suggestion was corroborated by a research that found that liberals reacts better to conflict detection, and their anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) was more active during conflict detecting <ref>Amodio, D. M., Jost, J. T., Master, S. L., & Yee, C. M. (2007). Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism. Nature neuroscience, 10(10), 1246–1247.</ref>. This may explain why on everage, liberals are more intelligent than conservatives <ref>Hodson, G., & Busseri, M. A. (2012). Bright minds and dark attitudes: lower cognitive ability predicts greater prejudice through right-wing ideology and low intergroup contact. Psychological science, 23(2), 187–95. doi:10.1177/0956797611421206</ref>.