It is very typical for such kind of paper using only the American political system and with a brief overview the authors arent aware of that flaw (also very typical)
It might be at least interesting to see the hypothesis tested in a multi - party - system or countries with a less polarised society. Even similar polarised countries might be an interesting study subject as an parallel experiment..
Do you expect that human brain adaptation occurs differently for some reason in environments where "individuals who share an ideology" happen to not be sharing "American" ideologies?
In non-media-hyped societies, voters of different parties can sit on the same table and talk about their lives without ever touching political issues. This kind of polarisation is a US phenomenon that is spreading worldwide like wildfire through mass-media outlets.
Yeah, I'm sure that would've gone over well in Germany in the 30ies, NSDAP members and KPD members discussing their lives without touching political issues.
Case in point from where I live: Bulgaria. Just 10 years ago I can remember a time when Facebook was used primarily for sharing family photos and journeys. Now it has become a toxic pit where grumpy and bitter aunties are reading fake news and writing insulting name-calling comments after anyone who expresses disagreement. Political figures are impulsively posting short write-ups, full of emotional hatred. Short memes and news-invented neologisms are circulating all over the societal discourse. Problems that were once non-existent in Bulgarian society, are now discussed with vehement enthusiasm and basic misunderstanding.
Unfortunately we don't have access to an alternate universe where Bulgaria has taken the same trajectory in all things but Facebook, Twitter etc had been banned.
But my guess is: it wouldn't have mattered. I don't believe that we get that behavior because Facebook enables us to be petty. I believe that we get that behavior because of the circumstances (i.e. rapidly changing economical and cultural environment that make people fearful and uncertain and will make them fall back on their core values) and people realizing that you can convince/manipulate others better if you deliver your messages in a short, meme-style format, appeal to their emotions, play into identity politics and "own" the other side. Even if you outlawed Facebook, once politicians, activists etc realize that this works, they'll use it in whatever media you allow.
The only winning move (individually) is not to play, at least that's my experience. You can tune out, concentrate on whatever you deem important and the world won't fall apart just because you're not spending your time and energy explaining to people that they're being manipulated, because after all, most things move slowly. Before each election, everybody speaks as if this was the one that matters. As if, should they lose this time, all is lost because they will destroy everything. And afterwards, everything just trots on as it always has (Yes, I'm sure there are exceptions, but in most countries the situation isn't exceptional). And if you do play and try to educate others about their manipulated intellects, all they'll see is that you are being manipulated and you're now trying to manipulate them. It feels great sometimes to tell them off and get applause, but you won't change hearts and minds, and you should be aware that it's a game.
On the other hand, I firmly believe: if you want to improve society, hug the bitter aunties, ask them how they've been and share some traditional food you can bond over, that'll make it much easier to communicate and find common ground.
Hmm, is the article talking about party members, or just people who identify with certain beliefs? Its seems to me like you risk comparing apples and oranges.
It was, but it wasn't "a US phenomenon that is spreading worldwide like wildfire through mass-media outlets". People don't need mass-media with a 24-hours news-cycle and social media bubbles to get polarized.
> it might be a case for societies where is a stronger group identification (e.g. identification for the nation)
Did you mean nation as in ethnicity? Because otherwise I think the US's identification with the nation is pretty strong across both camps.
> And again, American political system is rather unique in the Western world.
It is? Even with multiple small parties, you'll still largely get ideological camps. It's rare that you have parties that pick their ideas from all over the place.
> Nation can be seen as an consensus ideology and if you share some opinions you can get along better on other topics.
In some sense, it's the job of public education, particularly through the curricula of history and $local-official-language, to establish that consensus ideology - to create unity by exposing everyone to the same large landscape of stories, opinions and beliefs, so that any two people of a nation can quickly establish some common ground between themselves and get along.
> to create unity by exposing everyone to the same large landscape of stories, opinions and beliefs
Or, in other words: to the same reality (it doesn't matter whether it's factually accurate, only that it's widely shared).
Is there a way back to more shared reality without one side wiping out the other? A common threat that just makes the differences in perception meaningless next to the shared perception of that threat? Aliens invading would probably help, at least temporarily. Maybe, if you keep that up for two generations, they'll have forgotten most of the ideological identities that had divided them, and will only rediscover them after some amount of lasting peace?
Sure, and some political decisions have broad consensus in the US as well, e.g. Medicaid. But that really doesn't say much, because other topics are different and the NHS being broadly accepted doesn't help with collectivism vs individualism, pro/anti-EU etc.
to refer back to my original point: Other nations have a more common ground so the study result might not apply to other countries. I think I showed enough reasonable arguments for that potencial case.
Because American "ideologies" also correlate strongly to city vs rural, skin color and ethnicity, and other factors, which is not necessarily the case in many/most countries whereas there might be more choices, and the kind of people believing in each more equally diatributed...
I live in Germany and I would say, that is very much the case here, in fact probably more so than in the US.
And in any case, why would you expect this to not be the case? Should people in different living circumstances magically have the same beliefs, interests and desires?
>Should people in different living circumstances magically have the same beliefs, interests and desires?
Magically no, just practically. Which is often the case, because the ideologies concerned don't touch on rural vs urban "beliefs, interests and desires" but other divisions, like progressive vs conservative, environmental vs economic push, nationalist vs regionalist, and others. Sometimes the "beliefs, interests and desires" are even irrelevant, as dominant parties offer the same kind of programs, and it's just party loyalty that gets one to one or the other.
Germany has 5 parties in parliament (with sizable representation), the US has had two for a good while (with insignificant independent inroads). German party ideology is much more segreggated and divided among states than in Germany. Germany is much more homogeneous by population. And many other factors besides.
You obviously did not get around much, and never ventured out of your peer group abroad. If anything, humans are remarkably similar, and that similarity transfers even to the ugly of racism, sexism etc.
Just because some country has no empire to project the ugly, doesent mean its not there.
I've actually travelled all around the world (including the US), but thanks for the irrelevant ad-hominem...
>If anything, humans are remarkably similar, and that similarity transfers even to the ugly of racism, sexism etc.
Which is neither here, nor there.
Nor does every country/culture has the same levels of racism, sexism, etc. Same way they don't have the same levels of religiousness, mass shootings, and so on.
Naw, alot of the mass shooting is just empire violence, the individual thinking itself something elevated by virtue of being part of society, can no longer take insults/setbacks and goes on a rampage against the insulting other and its future.
Its all been there and it has been widespread, though not always in this shape and form.
Religiosity in the U.S. used to be a source of tolerance and even liberalism. That's because though predominately Christian, the U.S. was diversely Christian, composed of denominations and sects that were previously and in some cases contemporaneously killing each other in Europe.
I think it's a worthwhile reminder as it provides an example of two things: 1) religiosity is not synonymous with conservatism and balkanization, and 2) diversity is not synonymous with an inability to cooperate or share an identity.
Maybe they should say, “individuals who share the same American ideology”.
What is interesting to me is this part of the abstract:
…revealing that polarization can arise from differences in the brain’s affective valuations of political concepts.
I wonder if things are reversed in the sense that consuming the same sort of news content causes those peoples’ brains to end up with the same affective valuations. I know nothing about neuroscience but it seems if we took someone with centrist or left leaning views and subjected them to only political news from very right wing sources for a long time maybe their brains would be altered.
Is it reasonable to wonder if similarities in brain responses to political concepts comes from consuming the same sort of media messages? Is Fox News (or left wing equivalent) unwittingly changing our brains (brain washing)?
I suspect the opposite is true. Political orientation likely maps onto personality traits: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-55834023. The relevant political issues of the time may then cause people to react to them differently depending on personality traits, and cause people with similar traits to coalesce into like minded coalitions.
That being said, psychology is a pseudoscience so who knows what anything is anyway.
Then explain political realignments. I personally have completely switched political parties in the last year, and I am not a 24 year old who’s brain wasn’t developed.
Your brain does chemically change later in life, especially when you have kids. Apart from that, political parties are coalitions of different groups, and those coalitions (and the parties) change as the salient issues change. COVID was a good example of this, where the “fuck the establishment” types Trump recently brought into the GOP clashed with the “conformity and order” Romney types that traditionally controlled the GOP. My county, which includes Annapolis, went for Romney in 2012 and for Larry Hogan by 38 points, but Biden by 14. The area has a large military officer presence, and their inclination toward conformity, discipline, and order cut differently during COVID than when other issues were more salient.
People can be “brainwashed” or “deprogrammed”. Does this change the brain? Certainly the direction you propose is plausible. I wonder what the direction of the cause/effect is.
This commitment arose from their conversion experiences and their gradual, conditioned acceptance of ethical misbehavior.
I don’t have a formal definition of “brainwashing”. That term, to me, is akin to gradual, conditioned acceptance. From my reading of the article the author and I seem to have different perceptions of what the word “brainwashing” means. He does say that people are moving away from the term “brainwashing” and using terms like “coercive persuasion”.
This line too stood out to me:
We don’t say that soldiers are brainwashed to kill other people; that’s basic training.
I actually would say that soldiers are brainwashed. I use that term in a colloquial sense. I use in the sense of the video linked to below.
Let me state my question in a different way, does gradual, conditioned acceptance change one’s brain in any significant way?
Yes and no amount of random articles will convince people this obvious fact is untrue. People can be conditioned and brainwashed just as I can breathe the air.
From one of the authors: "It's not a linear regression. This representation is a typical mistake when using mixed effect statistics. It is a "dyadic regression" which is a complex mixed effects procedure. We avoid such representation for ME but reviewers ask." (https://twitter.com/ulugeyik/status/1623654892639330304)
So there's more to the story but that graph is really easy to make fun of because it looks like a linear regression.
Oh ok, just seemed like it from the way he talked but yeah, it is dyadic regression so there's more the story (no idea what it is) but it's still such a terrible graph that I would never want to put in a paper.
Brain Thing Correlates With Other Brain Thing is the expected result of any two Brain Things, because all the Brain Things correlate. The failure here is a variant of the Streetlight Effect; we looked for this one correlation, we found it, so it must be important. It's not, unless it's really strong, because in this space, everything correlates to everything. To be important, there needs to be something more than "a correlation"; that's so expected as to be a near zero-bit contribution to science. For there not to be any correlation would actually be the surprising thing!
From my brief reading on dyadic regression your first sentence is why dyadic regressions are used in the circumstances of the paper. I don’t know the validity of the paper but I do strongly suspect Sabine doesn’t either and that her Tweet says more about her ignorance of the topic than it does about the validity of the paper.
I find there is a substantial difference between the intended performance of statistical tools intended to compensate for such things, and the actual performance of such tools. See also the attempt to filter out "confounding" variables in more normal statistical analyses; I personally believe that the effectiveness of such tools are extremely overstated and overestimated. There is a certain intrinsic circularity to any such tool.
I don’t know neuroscience. I do know that sometimes there is so little known about a given area that one has to grasp at straws so to speak. You look for clues and present the findings. I don’t know what one does with the data represented. It appears to me that the data doesn’t represent a function. There’s a lot of “verticality” in the data. It’s obviously not exponential, logarithmic, or parabolic or some other higher degree polynomial. So how does one fit such data? I don’t know. Is it dumb to use linear fit? Or is it common practice with such data?
The data does not appear to me to represent a function. There is a lot of verticality to the data. It’s doesn’t appear to me to be logistic, exponential, or a higher degree polynomial. What is the best model? I don’t know. I’m not a statistician or a neuroscientist. Maybe they have reasons for doing a linear fit in this case that we aren’t aware of. Typically experts have reasons for what they do and their reasons would seem reasonable to me if I knew what they did.
There’s an old Arabic philosophy that also suggests facial similarities between people that share similar thinking, or more like your facial features will develop according to your personality traits so eventually your look will converge to your likeminded. The theory goes further by classifying these looks into the closest animal and the traits from that animal.
The specific theory is bogus, but is the general principle completely unthinkable? For instance, some facial features might correlate with hormone exposure during development, which in turn might correlate with brain development and thus character traits. Might not be a very strong correlation, of course, but human brains are exceptional in pattern recognition when it comes to facial features.
If you look similar you probably come from the same place. If you come from the same place you were probably exposed to the same culture. If you were exposed to the same culture you probably hold very similar worldviews.
I mean, it's not that deep of a theory, especially in the old days were people moved a lot less and culture norms were strongly enforced
No. Another kind user @badcppdev posted links to these theories up in the thread. You will find these various similarities across cultures and races, and you will find differences within one family and village.
What he linked is not relevant to what I said, plus I used a probabilistic and not deterministic argument.
You could deduce where people came from by how they looked because the world was much more inbred and isolated in the past. As such you could correlate physical characteristic with cultural upbringings and thus worldviews.
Yet another reason to discount the philosophical concept of free will. We are all born with genes we didn’t choose and raised by people we didn’t choose in environments we didn’t choose… and any ‘choices’ we make thereafter are heavily influenced by those factors, all of which were completely out of our control.
In my opinion this is a failure of systems thinking: "Your (money / horse / car / thinking) is no good use this (money / horse / car / thinking) instead."
There is an epistemological problem with evaluating the objectivity and authority of such statements, as well as a question of fitness for local conditions. These things can be in conflict, there is no one global correct answer.
If we all actually accepted this today, incarceration and policing reforms become an immediate moral imperative, as would changing attitudes about the behaviors of those around us. The resulting societal changes would arguably change the world for the better.
The notion that individuals should be punished for circumstances outside of their control is as problematic as jailing someone for getting the flu.
This isn’t to claim that criminal behavior is acceptable or that nothing should be done about it, but the change in understanding of the behavior itself would immediately demand a shift towards rehabilitation instead of punishment/vengeance.
Some people are still gonna have to be locked up, just like critically ill patients require ongoing care. But headlines like “scientists make breakthrough discovery in correcting brain chemistry that leads to sociopathy” will be as exciting as headlines about cancer cures.
It would change nothing. We incarcerate to deter crime, and deterrents are a factor in decisions regardless of if you believe free will is a meaningful concept.
> Some people are still gonna have to be locked up
The point is not that people do not need to be deterred, but that the nature of that deterrence and the policies related to locking people up must change with such a revelation.
Such a revelation would also explain rates of recidivism, and shine a light on how counterproductive our current policies most likely are.
As we learn more about the brain, some form of this is already playing out. Accused criminals have been exhonerated on account of tumors growing on their brains, the removal of which returned the individual to “normal”.
Tumors are obvious, but as we learn more, I suspect we’ll find that many forms of criminality may be treatable.
Yeah, it's hilarious because it's a useless question and a useless answer.
Because what they're asking is "What if we could fundamentally change existence?" That's what it would take to perform these reforms without the existence of free will. Because people wouldn't have the choice to do whatever.
So while we would have to accept that not only are criminals incapable of doing anything different, but also the police are incapable of doing anything different, and the people hiring them, etc. Turtles all the way down.
> So while we would have to accept that not only are criminals incapable of doing anything different, but also the police are incapable of doing anything different, and the people hiring them, etc. Turtles all the way down.
This is an oversimplification/misreading of the philosophical ideas behind the notion that free will might not exist.
Proponents of the 'no free will' camp generally understand this to mean that we are not the conscious authors of our thoughts, and that thoughts are the product of one's lifetime of experiences and the result of those experience on one's specific biology.
In such a model of the world, the police would absolutely be capable of change, since knowledge is a potent change agent.
We already society is capable of this kind of change by looking at the history of slavery. A growing understanding of the value of each human life made the abolition of slavery a moral imperative for similar reasons. Such a cultural shift didn't happen overnight, though.
But only if they are the kind of people to change based on that information, etc.
And if free will absolutely does not exist and we're just the results of the sum of our experiences, then it's also inevitable that the abolition of slavery was going to happen because that's the sum of the total.
Free will is binary. You can't have just a little of it. And if the argument is that a lot of what we do is unconscious, then that's not arguing against free will. That's arguing against something else.
Joking aside, can I ask two things? 1. Do you actually believe strongly in the concept of free will? And 2. Are you at least moderately successful in life?
I've found that successful people generally don't like the idea that their achievements might not be the product of their own clever and freely made choices.
I am moderately successful in life, and I do believe in free will, but I also attribute much of my success to luck, and only smaller part to making the right choices.
> It is important to note that throughout our analyses, the topic of immigration elicited the strongest polarized response. That these effects did not extend to the other political topics is likely the result of the political climate at the time of data collection, which took place at the beginning of 2019, only a few months after D. Trump introduced the Build the Wall, Enforce the Law Act.
So it doesn't seem that there is a difference in general, just that the climate then created a very different environment for the sides. They didn't find such differences on abortion or black lives matter, its just immigration in a very special time.
> Through targeted online and field recruiting (N = 360), we invited 44 participants (equally split among liberals and conservatives) to participate in a study on political cognition
And thats your problem with science. We dont know how old these people are, we dont know the selection process, ie were they all recruited down the local Masonic Lodge, or at a University, or at a Church.
More data is needed on the recruitment processes in order to eliminate any selection or manipulation bias, otherwise am I watching a scientific magic show?
We dont know if these people are Early Adopters on the Everett Rogers Diffusion of innovations curve.
It might be better to title this study, fMRI used to map Social Conformity as studied by people like Solomon Asch or fMRI used to map Authority to Obedience as studied by people like Stanley Milgram and more recently Phillip Zimbardo, where the idea's/ideology are the authority.
An obtuse study (and obtusely written article) that concludes truisms: birds of a feather; people preferring to congregate with others of similar interests.
The study purports to document physical characteristics in Republican and Democratic brains related to the good vibes associated with preaching to the choir.
I think that people confuse the tech-bro subculture with the wider developer subculture. My experience has been that the developer subculture is often more progressive than libertarian.
The developer subculture is mostly pro meritocracy, so it isn't really modern progressive. Developers were progressive when meritocracy was progressive, but now they aren't.
I don't think the "developer subculture" is clearly bounded or uniform geographically. You state that the developer subculture has stayed with pro-meritocracy but I think it has changed.
Where could we find a definition to check that we were referring to the same thing?
From the internal forums at Google, from what I see online and have seen offline.
Modern progressive anti-meritocracy people might be loud, but they are a small minority, even at Google at the height of progressivism there you would see pro-meritocracy views winning out strongly among developers. You also see it here, I feel most here on HN are pro meritocracy. There are some progressives around who go into every thread about the topic and post a lot, but meritocracy views and topics tend to get upvoted.
It might be at least interesting to see the hypothesis tested in a multi - party - system or countries with a less polarised society. Even similar polarised countries might be an interesting study subject as an parallel experiment..