The Right-Wing Brain is Different; We Should Try to Understand It.

Neuroscience is unlocking a deeper understanding of how we choose our political affiliations. Here, I provide an insight into how this can help us regain the middle-ground.

There are many reasons for choosing a political affiliation. On the right - certainly what the right has become -, there are a host of different motivations that have led to its ascendency. Some promote right-wing ideology in the hope of securing something for themselves - lower taxes, for example. Some do genuinely believe that conservatism is the best way for society to prosper. They have applied some thought to it and view a small state and lack of regulation as a pathway for creating opportunities for ordinary people. Undoubtedly, this group of conservatives have become less dominant as conservatism has been hijacked by oligarchs and supremacists looking to exploit the power democracy yields and see the voters on the right as an easy target.

Then there is another group - the easy targets - who have gravitated towards the right for another reason altogether. It is not that they have weighed up the different ideologies and policies and come to an informed decision about which party will ultimately have a beneficial effect on their lives or the society to which they belong. Nor do they have any sense that they will be among the few conservatives who will eventually wield the power attained from co-opting democracy. No, this group are motivated by something else.

Thankfully, neuroscience has some answers as to why working and middle-class people, and even those in abject poverty, would support a movement clearly not in their own interests.

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The number of studies examining how those on the right-wing think in comparison to the left is substantial. Exploring issues from general cognitive ability to IQ to verbal comprehension to autonomic responsiveness has led to a quite deep understanding of how a certain brain may be more vulnerable to right-wing rhetoric. More recently (last couple of decades), we have also ventured into brain imaging studies and even functional brain imaging. Functional brain imaging is when we scan someone’s brain as they are exposed to a certain stimulus - a political speech or advert, for example. So impressive have these results been that some studies suggest that you can predict with up to 88% accuracy whether a person is conservative or liberal based purely on their brain scan images.

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Many of us are asking the same question: how is the right convincing so many people to vote against the interest of self, country and the planet? I think neuroscience holds some answers. We should use these answers to improve the way we affect change and reach those who I would call the ‘suggestible voter’.

The science can be quite dry and aloof if you are not in the field of study. Even for those in the field, it takes considerable effort to properly engage some of the scientific material out there. And scientists are generally very poor at communicating the relevance of their findings to the public. So, I will be clear from the start: this is where I think the science has brought us to. The following is my interpretation of what I think is applicable to understanding the right-wing mind and the ‘suggestible voter’. I will not share the nuance with you. I will not beat around the bush. The following is how I see it.

Three main patterns strike me as relevant here:

1. Those who follow right-wing ideology tend towards lower intelligence and narrower cognitive abilities.

2. Those who gravitate towards the right show a consistent tendency to be dominated more by fear than reason.

3. There seems to be more consistency in the response of someone on the right to the same right-wing stimulus, suggesting a greater susceptibility to being ‘programmed’ to feel, think and act in a certain way.

Bearing in mind there are many reasons someone may follow a political party, and therefore there is a lack of generalisation to any political party, there remains a surprisingly consistent formulation to explain the ‘right-wing’ brain differences.

One explanation is that the ‘right-wing’ brain simply has fewer mental/cognitive resources from which to develop the ability to choose when issues get complicated. That is, when issues regarding the economy, healthcare, education, foreign policy, gender, race, and other higher social matters are brought into the political discourse, many on the right (the so-called, ‘susceptible voter’) do not have the cognitive tools to consider them within the stress of political decision-making.

The evidence for this is really quite substantial. Cognitive testing studies (of which there have been dozens) consistently demonstrate that general cognitive ability is lower and that specific abilities such as verbal comprehension are also lacking, in comparison to left-wing subjects. The largest meta-analyses (large studies comparing all the relevant studies) have consistently shown that those with poorer cognitive performance (less intelligent) tend towards right-wing ideology and prejudice. Further, these trends are even stronger when the views held are authoritarian or ethnocentric. That is, less intelligent people gravitate towards being part of a system of being ruled that supports the idea that their race (or group) is superior.

Brain imaging gives further details to the processes of this generally poorer cognitive performance in the conservative brain. The most consistent finding in terms of structure is that those on the right tend to have a bigger amygdala. The amygdala is a primitive part of the brain we start using very early on in development and governs amongst other things our perception (and therefore response) to fear. The functional studies (observing how the brain responds to certain stimuli) support this even further with a very clear activation in the fear pathways in those on the right compared to the left and less use of the higher brain function of reason and decision-making under certain stimuli.

Indeed, when functional MRI scanners are used, these ‘fear’ pathways are activated in a remarkably consistent fashion across the right-wing brain when the subject is exposed to a right-wing politician’s speech. Whereas, in the left-wing brain there is generally less uniformity in the response to either left or right-wing speeches, and where the uniformity exists, it is not a ‘fear’ dominant pathway and uses much more of the higher cortical structures associated with decision-making. To put it bluntly (and therefore more inaccurately), those on the left are thinking about what is being said before reacting, whereas those on the right are going more with how the speaker makes them feel.

There are a number of theories as to how all this transpires. Are those on the right less well-educated? Is there some form of emotional, psychological or physical abuse at the root of this heightened fear-response? Is poverty and the insecurity it brings the unsettling factor that leads to reacting even in adulthood - even when dealing with important life-defining issues - based more on fear than on thought? Perhaps it’s more biological with perinatal and childhood nutrition playing a role? And what of the role of religion and dogma? Or being in a heavily patriarchal hierarchy?

We will examine some of these issues in later instalments. It is though, likely to be multi-factorial and probably more complicated than a lack of educational opportunity. For example, a quite consistent finding is that there is minimal difference in numerical skills between right-wing and left-wing cohorts - the difference is mainly in verbal comprehension. The evidence supporting abusive or traumatic upbringings is tangential but also viable. There is also a valid question as to whether a section of those who gravitate towards the right are doing so due to psychological damage as children (an emotionally distant or abusive parent or witnessing some form of domestic abuse).

These are not just academic issues. It is important to understand how someone who is impoverished, who struggles to afford healthcare, who is concerned that the youth are too materialistic, etc… can then vote to widen the inequalities they face. It is important to make sure that as knowledge and evidence advances that all in society benefit from it - that we all become better critical thinkers. For it is quite clear that when someone has not developed the parts of the brain that allow for more critical thought - effectively giving them fewer mental resources to engage in important sociopolitical issues - they revert to stereotypical behaviour, to a submission to an authoritarian framework - more dogmatic, rigid and prejudicial. It may well (indeed, it is likely) that those who are drawn over to the message that their ‘tribe’ is greater than others do not have the physical cognitive development to engage in the diversity inherent to any large community. Simply ignoring the biology of it and effectively creating a new area of inequality helps neither the individual nor society in general.

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You can see that some politicians have half-picked up on this. It is why we have the surge in more simplistic and emotive political slogans and why some on the left have drifted over to the right in both the content and the form of their rhetoric.

As I say, it is only half right. Yes, they are correct to identify the fear-based programming that the right exploits to keep a working-class base voting against their own interests, but they are wrong to think the actual messages need to be the same to pull those ‘susceptible voters’ over. It is the emotive nature of the right’s regressive rhetoric that keeps them hooked. It’s the basic fears around the economy and children and safety that the amygdala pivots on. It need not be the fear of immigrants or the fear of the imaginary ‘woke-mind’ virus [more on how the complexity of political correctness causes those with less mental development to fail to engage it in later instalments]. Indeed, it is these very emotive and fabricated reasons for their fears that we progressives need to substitute with the actual truth about the source of their fears. The real fear with the economy is that we hand over the power to affect the economic system to those who have no inclination to help ordinary people and will only use that power to enrich themselves and widen the inequalities we are all so upset about. The fear in education is that we allow those who have a vested interest in keeping you afraid and narrow-minded the power to control the developing brain. The fear is that those who have used immigration to programme the fear pathways into voting for supremacists gain the power to remove the benefits of immigration and simply cause more angst, more division, and yes, you guessed it, more fear. The challenge for political strategists is not to move their messaging and policies over to the right but to use the same cognitive processes to change the emotional relief the ‘susceptible voter’ achieves from listening to the divisive right-wing politician and shift it over to the reality behind their fears.

The same goes for us all. We think we can make those who facilitated the surge in divisive, hateful rhetoric see reason and meet us in a critical-thought exercise to expose the truth. We need to be more basic. We need to recognise that for whatever reason - poverty, childhood trauma, abuse, lack of opportunity - those ‘susceptible voters’ need an alternative way to feel that their anxieties and fears have been or will be dealt with.

It is only when the progress that those on the centre and the left have made can continue - e.g. holding men accountable for domestic abuse, regulating alcohol consumption, improving state-funded education, improving maternal care and increasing the minimum wage for all - can we address the cause for disenfranchised, angry, and distrusting people failing to achieve a more complete neurological development. We must engage those who are susceptible to right-wing programming so we can continue to progress democracy, narrow the gap between rich and poor, and ultimately give everyone the opportunity to develop fully.