Intolerance to uncertainty modulates neural synchrony between political partisans

Abstract

Political partisans see the world through an ideologically biased lens. What drives political polarization? It has been posited that polarization arises because holding extreme political views satisfies a need for certain and stable beliefs about the world. We examined the relationship between uncertainty tolerance and political polarization using brain-to-brain synchrony analysis, which measured committed liberals' and conservatives' subjective interpretation of a continuous political narrative. Participants (N=44) watched a political debate while undergoing fMRI. Shared ideology between participants increased neural synchrony in many brain areas including key regions of the valuation and theory-of-mind networks (e.g. temporoparietal junction). The degree of neural synchrony was modulated by uncertainty aversion: Uncertainty-intolerant individuals experienced greater brain-to-brain synchrony with politically like-minded peers and lower synchrony with political opponents. This effect was observed for liberals and conservatives alike. Moreover, increasing neural synchrony between committed partisans predicted subsequent polarized attitude formation about the debate after the scanning session. These results suggest that uncertainty attitudes gate the shared neural processing of political narratives, thereby fueling polarized attitude formation about hot-button issues.

The cognitive and perceptual correlates of ideological attitudes: a data-driven approach

“…It, therefore, appears that caution may be a time-scale independent decision strategy: individuals who are politically conservative may be perceptually cautious as well. This finding supports the idea of 'elective affinities' [1] between cognitive dispositions and ideological inclinations and is compatible with the perspective that political conservatism is associated with heightened motivations to satisfy dispositional needs for certainty and security [2,3,81,82]. Nonetheless, to the best of our knowledge, ideological attitudes have never before been investigated in relation to caution as measured with cognitive tasks and drift-diffusion parameters.…”

“…The present results, therefore, offer a novel addition to this literature by suggesting that political conservatism may be a manifestation of a cautious strategy in processing and responding to information that is both time-invariant and ideologically neutral, and can be manifest even in rapid perceptual decision-making processes. This is relevant to the wealth of novel research on the role of uncertainty in the neural underpinnings of political processes [ 26 , 27 , 31 , 83 ].…”

The polarized mind in context: Interdisciplinary approaches to the psychology of political polarization.

“…Second, instead of averaging the recorded brain signal across all participants, ISCs leverage the comparison of brain responses between individuals. This makes it possible to test how differences in subjective experience-a hallmark of polarization-arise between individuals (van Baar et al, 2020). Participants come into the lab with preexisting differences in their prior knowledge, epistemic needs, and so forth, allowing us to test which of these individual differences drive differences in the neural processing of political information.…”

“…First, a polarizing experience can now be simulated more effectively in the lab. Activity time courses can be time locked to a complex, continuous stimulus such as a video or audio clip (Finn et al, 2018; Leong et al, 2020; van Baar et al, 2020; Yeshurun et al, 2017), which means we no longer have to rely on static, repetitive stimuli. This is crucial for studying polarization, which is known to arise from consuming rich, ambiguous political information in a partisan context (Pomerantsev, 2019).…”

Negative affect homogenizes and positive affect diversifies social memory consolidation across people

“…Priming and trait biases have been leveraged to evoke individual differences in default network while viewing ambiguous 12,32 and polarizing 10,11 stimuli, respectively. Highly emotional content has also been used to show that negative emotions correspond with greater inter-subject neural synchrony.…”