Procuring Power from Fear: Political conservatives and their ‘low effort thought’
Since the invention of fMRI in the 1990s, brain imaging and neural mapping studies have allowed research scientists to significantly increase their understanding of the inner workings of the human brain, including the neurobiological mechanisms that mediate political attitudes. Research at the intersection of neuroscience, psychology and politics began emerging over a decade ago and could be key to understanding the disturbing state of global politics right now.
The pages of journals in political psychology relating brain structure to political ideology could be mistaken for a script of our current reality, with a body of evidence suggesting that conservativism is a political ideology involving the manipulation of neurobiological mechanisms related to the processing of fear-inducing stimuli for the procurement of power. Imaging studies on political orientation have shown that the part of the brain associated with the processing of fear and negative emotion, the right amygdala, is enlarged in participants who align with conservative political attitudes (Kanai et al., 2011).
A greater volume in the amygdala is associated with heightened sensitivity and bias toward threat when determining whether stimulus is neutral or threatening. Correlating with another study where participants were asked to perform a risk-taking activity during functional imaging, liberal and conservative political adherents displayed divergent cognitive strategies when thinking about risk, with findings further supporting evidence that conservatives show greater threat sensitivity to stimulus (Schreiber et al., 2013).
The neurobiological processes related to the amygdala, part of the limbic system – or emotional brain, are rooted in evolution. The instinctual fear and suspicion of anything that is different to us or our ingroup may have once aided human survival, but in a world of eight billion humans and finite volume of habitable land it is cause for division and conflict. The amygdala is vital to survival responses, receiving signals from the outside world several milliseconds before the information is forwarded on to other parts of the brain; however, any judgement about threat made by the amygdala can be overridden when rationality is applied, by the prefrontal cortex (PFC), or rational brain.
The PFC powers our distinctly human higher executive functions such as the capacity for rational deliberation, empathy, language and social cooperation. These higher executive functions of the brain can be cognitively expensive, requiring more energy to operate than the limbic system which operates on memory and instinct. The more frequently we side with our amygdala, however, making judgements out of fear, the stronger those neural pathways become – hence, developing a sensitivity to threat.
Stress, fatigue, cost of living pressures and lived experience are all factors causing individuals to default to emotional responses driven by the amygdala and the limbic system rather than rational ones. By pushing narratives that inequality is inherent, inflaming nationalist sentiment with an immigrant bogeyman, and othering – the procurement of power by fashioning a threat out of a subordinate group that a dominant group fears, we can assert that conservative ideology thrives on emotional responses (White, 2022).
Research corroborates this idea, with one study showing that political conservativism is associated with “low effort thought”; that is, a lack of engagement with the brains’ higher executive functions (Eidelman et al., 2012). Participants increasingly endorsed conservative ideology as they were subjected to either increased cognitive load, time stresses or alcohol intoxication. Researchers stated that “the data suggests that political conservatism may be a process consequence of low effort thought; when effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases” (Eidelman et al, 2012). Anti-intellectualism, prohibition of critical thought, lack of social cooperation and the inflammation of the fear related to difference are all factors keeping conservative politicians in power.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines hysteria as “behaviour exhibiting overwhelming or unmanageable fear or emotional excess”, a condition that was weaponised to oppress and institutionalise predominantly women in the 19th century. It is also a condition that could easily describe conservative politics, given the scientific evidence so effectively intimates the dominant role of the emotional, rather than rational, brain in forming conservative political attitudes. A rational society is evidently a kind society; treating people with kindness is a rational human response, as social cooperation empathy and regulation of social behaviour are all higher executive functions of the PFC. Thankfully, the brain is neuroplastic, meaning it can change its structure over time, circumstance and application, and compassion can be trained (Weng et al., 2013).
Conservatives desire security, predictability, and authority more than liberals. They also have a greater bias toward negative or threatening stimuli. Understanding how the human brain toggles between emotional and rational functions can enlighten us as to why society is so politically polarised and divided along lines of ‘progress’ and ‘fear of progress’. Political conservatives appear to be expressing an overt emotional response to the increasing rights and freedoms of groups of people who have been traditionally oppressed.
W.E.B du Bois noted in his book, Black Reconstruction of America (1935), that despite improvements in the working conditions of black workers also benefitting white workers, white workers chose to align themselves with the upper class against their own interests, seeing themselves as ‘white’ before seeing themselves as ‘low-class labourer’. This phenomenon was labelled by Du Bois as a ‘psychological wage’. The white worker allegiance to the upper class and rejecting the improvement in their immediate working conditions, implies that social status is a greater pay-off and more critical to personal esteem than monetary wages (Du Bois, 1935).
By Du Bois’ theory, individuals will choose to remain poor so long as their psychological wage is paid, that is, they are permitted to feel themselves ‘better than’ or superior to another social group. The current backlash against the rights and freedoms of women, black, indigenous, foreign, queer and disabled people is an attempt to maintain a hierarchy that enforces the superiority of a group of people who believe their interests align with the upper class - and conservative politicians are happy to pay the psychological wage for power.
Emotions can only ever be the responsibility of their owner. Emotional maturity is progress.
References:
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1935). Black Reconstruction in America: Toward a History of the Part of which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880. Reprint, United Kingdom: Transaction Publishers, 2012.
Eidelman, S., Crandall, C. S., Goodman, J. A., & Blanchar, J. C. (2012). Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(6), 808-820. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167212439213
Kanai, R. Feilden, T., Firth, C., Rees, G. (2011) Political Orientations are correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults. Current Biology, 21 (8): 677-680.
Schreiber D, Fonzo G, Simmons AN, Dawes CT, Flagan T, Fowler JH, Paulus MP. Red brain, blue brain: evaluative processes differ in Democrats and Republicans. PLoS One. 2013;8(2):e52970. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0052970
Weng HY, Fox AS, Shackman AJ, Stodola DE, Caldwell JZ, Olson MC, Rogers GM, Davidson RJ. (2013) Compassion training alters altruism and neural responses to suffering. Psychological Science. 24(7):1171-80. DOI: 10.1177/0956797612469537
White, A. (2022). Profiling the President: explaining Donald Trump’s nationalistic foreign policy decisions using Leadership Trait Analysis and Operational Code Analysis. Contemporary Voices, 1(1), 5–. https://doi.org/10.15664/jtr.1569
