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Conservatives and Liberals

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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 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. [27]</ref>. Conservatives detect threatening faces more easily, with less effort [29]<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 [26]<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 [16]<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 [17][18]<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 [23]<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. (Hodson 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>. On the other hand liberals seems to have lower ability to work in groups as Lakoff suggested (ref). He suggested that liberals should learn from conservatives how to make greater coalitions, but the reason liberals are porrer preformers at social gathering may be due to brain tendency having lower volume of amygdala, which is involved in social learning. And indeed, liberals are more trusting but have smaller social networks, while conservatives find faster threatening facial emotion and have larger social networks<ref>Vigil, J. M. (2010). Political leanings vary with facial expression processing and psychosocial functioning. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 13(5), 547–558. doi:10.1177/1368430209356930</ref>.  Having lower amygdala volume does not mean that liberals are not felling threat. They detect threat less easily and therefore are more trusting, but when they do detect threat they react as conservatives<ref>Nail, P. R., McGregor, I., Drinkwater, A. E., Steele, G. M., & Thompson, A. W. (2009). Threat causes liberals to think like conservatives. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45(4), 901–907. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2009.04.013</ref>. This may be explained by the finding that the Amygdala can be controlled by the ACC<ref>Etkin, A., Egner, T., Peraza, D. M., Kandel, E. R., & Hirsch, J. (2006). Resolving emotional conflict: a role for the rostral anterior cingulate cortex in modulating activity in the amygdala. Neuron, 51(6), 871–882.</ref>. And as long as liberals do not recognize a threat they will be more engaged in learning through the ACC and it will suppress the amygdala, but when threat is recognized the ACC is turning-on the amygdala and more conservative style reactions will occur.  Some other research found that when engaging in risk conservatives handle risk with the right amygdala and liberals handle risk with the left insula<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>. The left insula is involved in warmth and painful sensations<ref>Stephani, C., Fernandez-Baca Vaca, G., Maciunas, R., Koubeissi, M., & Lüders, H. O. (2011). Functional neuroanatomy of the insular lobe. Brain structure & function, 216(2), 137–49. doi:10.1007/s00429-010-0296-3</ref>. This may imply that liberals will feel more pain when thinking on losing in risky conditions and therefore will be less ready to engage risk. This may explain why conservatives may favor war while liberals will try to find more peaceful solutions. '''Conclusions''':
On the other liberals seems to have lower ability to work in groups as Lakoff suggested. He suggested that liberals should learn from conservatives how to make greater coalitions, but the reason liberals are porrer preformers at social gathering may be due to brain tendency having lower volume of amygdala, which is involved in social learning. And indeed, liberals are more trusting but have smaller social networks, while conservatives find faster threatening facial emotion and have larger social networks [28].
Having lower amygdala volume does not mean that liberals are not felling threat. They detect threat less easily and therefore are more trusting, but when they do detect threat they react as conservatives [25]. This may be explained by the finding that the Amygdala can be controlled by the ACC [24]. And as long as liberals do not recognize a threat they will be more engaged in learning through the ACC and it will suppress the amygdala, but when threat is recognized the ACC is turning-on the amygdala and more conservative style reactions will occur.
Some other research found that when engaging in risk conservatives handle risk with the right amygdala and liberals handle risk with the left insula [19]. The left insula is involved in warmth and painful sensations [21]. This may imply that liberals will feel more pain when thinking on losing in risky conditions and therefore will be less ready to engage risk. This may explain why conservatives may favor war while liberals will try to find more peaceful solutions.
Conclusions:
Conservatives uses the amygdala which is active in social learning and threat detection and handling and therefore are more social orinetd. Because every society has it won codes, conservative may tend to be more local-culuter oriented, and when they will engage different cultures and especialy very different cultures, they will be more un-knowing and therefore will feel more threathend. In General they feel more threat, and may prefer war over peace, because they feel less pain when evaluating the consequence.
Liberals are more intelligent and will try to solve social and non-social conflicts by thinking. They will avoid risks due to more sensitivity to pain and lost.