Brain and Politics: Anatomy of a Scandal

image source: Wired

I was not alone to find something weird with the imaging study published in the NYT.

I tried to synthesize here the main arguments about the study. This could be interesting for researchers interested in social epistemology

And if you are interested in more serious research, see this (less sexy) paper:

Ballew, C. C., & Todorov, A. (2007). Predicting political elections from rapid and unreflective face judgments. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(46), 17948-17953. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/104/46/17948

1. Unwarranted claims

As cognitive neuroscientists who use the same brain imaging technology, we know that it is not possible to definitively determine whether a person is anxious or feeling connected simply by looking at activity in a particular brain region.. (Aron et al.)

2. “Just so” stories, unwarranted interpretation of the results

brain regions are typically engaged by many mental states, and thus a one-to-one mapping between a brain region and a mental state is not possible. (Aron et al.)

The scattered spots of activation in a brain image can be like tea leaves in the bottom of a cup – ambiguous and accommodating of a large number of possible interpretations. The Edwards insula activation might indicate disgust, but it might also indicate thoughts of pain or other bodily sensations or a sense of unfairness, to mention just a few of the mental states associated with insula activation. And of course the possibility remains that the insula activation engendered by Edwards represents other feeling altogether, yet to be associated with the insula. The Romney amygdala activation might indicate anxiety, or any of a number of other feelings that are associated with the amygdala – anger, happiness, even sexual excitement. (Farah)

Didn’t I just say that the amygdala is involved in positive emotions, too? So what does amygdala activation mean, then? Studies have also shown that mere emotional uncertainty (e.g., a neutral face) may activate the amygdala. (Ramsoy)

3. Unwarranted process

(...) the peer review process is critical to understanding whether the data are sound or based on faulty methodology. Unfortunately, the results reported in the article were apparently not peer-reviewed (...) we are distressed by the publication of research in the press that has not undergone peer review. (Aron et al.)

Their imaging study has not been published in any science journal, nor has it been vetted by experts in the field; it can't rightly be called an "experiment," since the authors weren't testing any particular hypothesis; and the arbitrary conclusions they draw from the data aren't even consistent with their own previous research. (Engber)

we don’t have a scientific reference, and only have to take the authors’ word for it. It’s a violation of every sensible way to report findings from a scientific method in the press. IMO, before you can do such a thing, you should at least (!) have a manuscript that is accepted, let alone published. And if you choose to do a test for the media, just “for fun”, then say so! This article pretends to be scientifically correct. It is not." (Ramsoy)

How can we tell whether the interpretations offered by Iacoboni and colleagues are adequately constrained by the data, or are primarily just-so stories? By testing their methods using images for which we know the “right answer.” If the UCLA group would select a group of individuals for which we can all agree in advance on the likely attitudes of a given set of subjects, they could carry out imaging studies like the ones they reported today and then, blind to the identity of personage and subject for each set of scans, interpret the patterns of activation. (Farah)

And as we reported in 2006, similar nonsense was repeated with the Super Bowl ads, by (guess who) the same team.None of these studies have ever been published in scientific journals so why does Iacoboni, who does lots of respectable cognitive neuroscience, keep running these essentially meaningless studies? (Bell)

4. Absence of experimental details

problems of interpretation with brain imaging studies can be avoided only by careful experimental design (...) [no] sufficient detail [were] provided to evaluate the conclusions." (Aron et al.)

Iacoaboni's team were on the front page of the NYT in 2004 with almost exactly the same stunt - attempting to use brain scans to predict responses when viewing political campaign ads.
The 'study' details have mysteriously gone from the web but are still archived if you want to see history repeating itself. (Bell)

the authors look at brain blobs and try to interpret their meanings in terms of previous knowledge. Is that bad? Yes it is, because it does not even attempt toput up testable hypotheses. And why don’t we get to know what is meant by “more active” or “respond more strongly”? What is this activation compared to? What is the contrast, the baseline? Even further, what is the statistical cutoff and how many other regions light up during conditions X, Y or Z? Where are all the tech specs that validate this study? (Ramsoy)

5. Dubious source and possible interest conflicts (FKF Applied Research, a neuromarketing firm)

The study comes straight from FKF Applied Research, a D.C.-based "neuromarketing" firm that conducts brain-based focus groups for Fortune 500 companies. For the past two years, FKF has finagled widespread coverage of its business by conducting spurious fMRI analyses of Super Bowl commercials and then announcing the winners and losers. (See, for example, "This Is Your Brain on a Super Bowl Ad.") Business Week, Time, Reuters, and MSNBC have all boosted the company's bottom line with free publicity, but no publication has been nearly as generous as the Times. To date, the paper has published eight articles about the company (including one on the front page) since it was founded three years ago. And now, as of Sunday, the Times has gone so far as to run two op-ed columns by FKF's Josh Freedman with exactly the same title. In neither case did the newspaper disclose his connection to the firm.
As the authors of what is essentially an extended FKF advertorial, Freedman and his colleagues have a strong incentive to tout their services and sex up the findings. (Engber)

All of these stunts are essentially PR for FKF Applied Research, a 'neuromarketing company' who will carry out bespoke brain scan marketing studies for a price. Iacoboni is not listed as a staff member but he's been associated with most of their previous media stunts and four out of five FKF staff are co-authors on the NYT article. We can bet there's some pretty strong connection there. (Bell)

6. Confused presentation of the data

in the brain states of subsets of the subjects, for example just the men or just the most negative voters. Some concern the brain states of the subjects early on in the scan compared with later in the scan. Some concern responses to still photos or to videos specifically (farah)

7. Confused conclusion

many of their conclusions seem either haphazard or comically vague. Take their first point: When test subjects were shown the name of a political party—either the words Republican, Democrat, or Independent—they responded with neural activity in the amygdala, the insula, and the striatum. According to the authors, these regions of the brain correspond to feelings of anxiety, disgust, and pleasure. Really, all three? From that meaningless mishmash of emotions, they meekly conclude that "voters sense both peril and promise in party brands." (Engber)

8.Contradictions with their previous study

A look back at the findings from 2004 casts doubt on their other conclusions as well. In 2007, activation of the superior temporal sulcus and the inferior frontal cortex was deemed a good sign for Fred Thompson—he was inspiring empathy from prospective voters. But in the previous study, activation of the same so-called "mirror neuron system" occurred only when voters viewed candidates of the opposing party, whom they despised. Likewise, when brain scans turned up relatively little activity in response to images of Barack Obama and John McCain, the authors concluded that these candidates "have work to do." But similar data from the 2004 experiment suggested just the opposite: Highly partisan voters showed much less brain activity when presented with the candidates they supported.
Across two analogous studies, the FKF team has interpreted the very same patterns of brain activity in very different ways—indeed, in opposite ways. (Engber)

9. Dubious motives

The fact that the UCLA study involved brain imaging will garner it more attention, and possibly more credibility among the general public, than if it had used only behavioral measures like questionnaires or people’s facial expressions as they watched the candidates. Because brain imaging is a more high tech approach, it also seems more “scientific” and perhaps even more “objective.” Of course, these last two terms do not necessarily apply. Depending on the way the output of UCLA’s multimillion dollar 3-Tesla scanner is interpreted, the result may be objective and scientific, or of no more value than tea leaves.(Farah)

Sources:

This Is Your Brain on Politics
Iacoboni et al, NYT

Politics and the Brain
(Aron et al., a group of 17 neuroscientists), NYT

This is Your Brain on Politics? (Farah Guest Post)
Martha Farah, Neuroethics & Law Blog

Neuropundits Gone Wild! Befuddling brain science on the opinion pages of the New York Times.
Daniel Engber, Slate

The death of critical science journalism in NY Times?
Thomas Ramsoy, Brainethics blog

Election brain scan nonsense
Vaughan Bell, Mind Hacks

Neuropolitics and the 2008 presidential elections

A team of neuroscientists published a neuropolitics studies in the NYT (is it me or that's kinda surprising to see someone publish, not report, that in the journal?). The studies will not reinvent political science or social psychology, but it shows how neuroscience are "asking the brain, not the person", to use Camerer's (2004) expression. The studies suggest that Clinton, Giulinani, Edwards all elicit different patterns of emotions, that men and women reacted differently to Clinton, people empathize with Thompson, Mitt Romney elicits anxiety, etc. Here is how the words democrat, republican and independent excite people's brain:

and that is how men and women react to picture of Hillary Clinton:


Related Posts:

• My brain has a politics of its own: neuropolitic musing on values and signal detection
• The Political Brain
• A Neuropolitic look at political psychology

References

• Camerer, C. F., Loewenstein, G., & Prelec, D. (2004). Neuroeconomics: Why Economics Needs Brains. Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 106(3), 555-579.
• This Is Your Brain on Politics (NYT)

A roundup of the most popular posts

According to the stats, the 5 mots popular posts on Natural Rationality are:

1. Strong reciprocity, altruism and egoism
2. What is Wrong with the Psychology of Decision-Making?
3. My brain has a politics of its own: neuropolitic musing on values and signal detection
4. Rational performance and behavioral ecology
5. Natural Rationality for Newbies
   

Enjoy!

My brain has a politics of its own: neuropolitic musing on values and signal detection

Political psychology (just as politicians and voters) identifies two species of political values: left/right, or liberalism/conservatism. Reviewing many studies, Thornhill & Fincher (2007) summarizes the cognitive style of both ideologies:

Liberals tend to be: against, skeptical of, or cynical about familiar and traditional ideology; open to new experiences; individualistic and uncompromising, pursuing a place in the world on personal terms; private; disobedient, even rebellious rulebreakers; sensation seekers and pleasure seekers, including in the frequency and diversity of sexual experiences; socially and economically egalitarian; and risk prone; furthermore, they value diversity, imagination, intellectualism, logic, and scientific progress. Conservatives exhibit the reverse in all these domains. Moreover, the felt need for order, structure, closure, family and national security, salvation, sexual restraint, and self-control, in general, as well as the effort devoted to avoidance of change, novelty, unpredictability, ambiguity, and complexity, is a well-established characteristic of conservatives. (Thornhill & Fincher, 2007).

In their paper, Thornhill & Fincher presents an evolutionary hypothesis for explaining the liberalism/conservatism ideologies: both originate from innate adaptation to attachement, parametrized by early childhood experiences. In another but related domain Lakoff (2002) argued that liberals and conservatives differs in their methaphors: both view the nation or the State as a child, but they hold different perspectives on how to raise her: the Strict Father model (conservatives) or the Nurturant Parent model (liberals); see an extensive description here). The first one

posits a traditional nuclear family, with the father having primary responsibility for supporting and protecting the family as well as the authority to set overall policy, to set strict rules for the behavior of children, and to enforce the rules [where] [s]elf-discipline, self-reliance, and respect for legitimate authority are the crucial things that children must learn.

while in the second:

Love, empathy, and nurturance are primary, and children become responsible, self-disciplined and self-reliant through being cared for, respected, and caring for others, both in their family and in their community.

In the October issue of Nature Neuroscience, a new research paper by Amodio et al. study the "neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism". The study is more modest than the title suggests. Subject were submitted to the same test, a Go/No Go task (click when you see a "W" don't click when it's a "M"). The experimenters then trained the subjects to be used to the Go stimuli; on a few occasions, they were presented with the No Go stimuli. Since they got used to the Go stimuli, the presentation of a No Go creates a cognitive conflict: balancing the fast/automatic/ vs. the slow/deliberative processing. You have to inhibit an habit in order to focus on the goal when the habit goes in the wrong direction. The idea was to study the correlation between political values and conflict monitoring. The latter is partly mediated by the anterior cingulate cortex, a brain area widely studied in neuroeconomics and decision neuroscience (see this post). EEG recording indicated that liberals' neural response to conflict were stronger when response inhibition was required. Hence liberalism is associated to a greater sensibility to response conflict, while conservatism is associated with a greater persistence in the habitual pattern. These results, say the authors, are

consistent with the view that political orientation, in part, reflects individual differences in the functioning of a general mechanism related to cognitive control and self-regulation

Thus valuing tradition vs. novelty, security vs. novelty might have sensorimotor counterpart, or symptoms. Of course, it does not mean that the neural basis of conservatism is identified, or the "liberal area", etc, but this study suggest how micro-tasks may help to elucidate, as the authors say in the closing sentence, "how abstract, seemingly ineffable constructs, such as ideology, are reflected in the human brain."

What this study--together with other data on conservatives and liberal--might justify is the following hypothesis: what if conservatives and liberals are natural kinds? That is, "homeostatic property clusters", (see Boyd 1991, 1999), categories of "things" formed by nature (like water, mammals, etc.), not by definition? (like supralunar objects, non-cat, grue emerald, etc.) Things that share surface properties (political beliefs and behavior) whose co-occurence can be explained by underlying mechanims (neural processing of conflict monitoring)? Maybe our evolution, as social animals, required the interplay of tradition-oriented and novelty-oriented individuals, risk-prone and risk-averse agents. But why, in the first place, evolution did not select one type over another? Here is another completely armchair hypothesis: in order to distribute, in the social body, the signal detection problem.

What kind of errors would you rather do: a false positive (you identify a signal but it's only noise) or a false negative (you think it's noise but it's a signal)? A miss or a false alarm? That is the kind of problems modeled by signal detection theory (SDT): since there is always some noise and you try to detect signal, you cannot know in advance, under radical uncertainty, what kind of policy you should stick to (risk-averse or risk-prone. "Signal" and "noise" are generic information-theoretic terms that may be related to any situation where an agent tries to find if a stimuli is present:

Is is rather ironic that signal detection theorists employ the term liberal* and conservative* (the "*" means that I am talking of SDT, not politics) to refer to different biases or criterions in signal detection. A liberal* bias is more likely to set off a positive response ( increasing the probability of false positive), whereas a conservative* bias is more likely to set off a negative response (increasing the probability of false negative). The big problem in life is that in certain domains conservatism* pay, while in others it's liberalism* who does (see Proust 2006): when identifying danger, a false negative is more expensive (better safe than sorry) whereas in looking for food a false positive can be more expensive better (better satiated than exhausted). So a robust criterion is not adaptive; but how to adjust the criterion properly? If you are an individual agent, you must altern between liberal* and conservative* criterion based on your knowledge. But if you are part of a group, liberal* and conservative* biases may be distributed: certains individuals might be more liberals* (let's send them to stand and keep watch) and other more conservatives* (let's send them foraging). Collectively, it could be a good solution (if it is enforced by norms of cooperation) to perpetual uncertainty and danger. So if our species evolved with a distribution of signal detection criterions, then we should have evolved different cognitive styles and personality traits that deal differently with uncertainty: those who favor habits, traditions, security, and the others. If liberal* and conservative* criterions are applied to other domains such as family (an institution that existed before the State), you may end up with the Strict Father model and the Nurturant Parent model; when these models are applied to political decision-making, you may end up with liberals/conservatives (no "*"). That would give a new meaning to the idea that we are, by nature, political animals.


Related posts

• A Neuropolitic Look at Political Psychology
• The Political Brain
• A Neuroecomic Picture of Valuation
  

Links

• A clear discussion of the study at The Cognitive Daily.
• Political Psychology (Blackwell Publishing Journal)
• See their special issue: Political Psychology and Social Neuroscience: Strange Bedfellows or Comrades in Arms?, especially this review paper.
• Neuropolitics.org (Ezine)
• Neuropolitics mailing list.
• A presentation of Darren Schreiber research (not professor at UCSD in the Political Science Department) on neural studies of differences between political novices and sophisticates : "When asked political questions, political novices show higher activation in the prefrontal lobes, where deliberative thinking takes place. Political sophisticates show higher levels of temporal lobe activity, which suggests they 'have more meaning attached to these questions' "

References

• 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
• Boyd, R. (1991). Realism, Anti-Foundationalism and the Enthusiasm for Natural Kinds. Philosophical Studies, 61(1 - 2), 127.
• Boyd, R. (1999). Kinds, Complexity and Multiple Realization. Philosophical Studies, 95(1 - 2), 67.
• Lakoff, G. (2002). Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (read chapter 2 here)
• Proust, J. (2006 ). Metacognition and Animal Rationality. In S. Hurley & M. Nudds (Eds.), Rational Animals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  
• Thornhill, R., & Fincher, C. L. (2007). What is the relevance of attachment and life history to political values? Evolution and Human Behavior, 28(4), 215-222.
• Thorisdottir, H., Jost, J. T., Liviatan, I., & Shrout, P. E. (2007). Psychological Needs and Values Underlying Left-Right Political Orientation: Cross-National Evidence from Eastern and Western Europe. Public Opin Q, nfm008.

The Political Brain

A book review in the NYT of Drew Westen's new book, "The Political Brain".

Stop Making Sense

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: August 26, 2007

Between 2000 and 2006, a specter haunted the community of fundamentalist Democrats. Members of this community looked around and observed their moral and intellectual superiority. They observed that their policies were better for the middle classes. And yet the middle classes did not support Democrats. They tended to vote, in large numbers, for the morally and intellectually inferior party, the one, moreover, that catered to the interests of the rich.

How could this be?

Serious thinkers set to work, and produced a long shelf of books answering this question. Their answers tended to rely on similar themes. First, Democrats lose because they are too intelligent. Their arguments are too complicated for American voters. Second, Democrats lose because they are too tolerant. They refuse to cater to racism and hatred. Finally, Democrats lose because they are not good at the dark art of politics. Republicans, though they are knuckle-dragging simpletons when it comes to policy, are devilishly clever when it comes to electioneering. They have brilliant political consultants like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove, who frame issues so fiendishly, they can fool the American people into voting against their own best interests. (READ MORE)