Sponsored by: The New York University School of Continuing and Professional Studies, the Office of the Dean of Sciences at NYU, Science & the City, and the Academy's Psychology Section.

Many analysts suggest that issues like the economy and foreign policy will shape Americans' decisions in this year's presidential election. However, psychologists specializing in neurobehavioral research say it's not just issues but fundamental aspects of personality, and possibly even neurologic function, that may shape political attitudes. Three New York University researchers who specialize in this field outlined what psychological and neurological studies can tell us about elections and decision-making—and what they can't—during a September 17, 2008, symposium.

"One expert looking at how personality can shape one's political choices is NYU psychology professor John T. Jost. He and his colleagues have used a well-accepted model of personality, the Five Factor Model of personality, to determine whether basic personality differences lie at the heart of political differences. Of the five traits measured by various personality inventories—openness to new ideas, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—liberals and conservatives generally differ in only two, Jost reports. Liberals tend to score higher on all facets of openness, including curiosity, creativity, sensation-seeking, and valuing diversity and novelty for its own sake, he said. On the other hand, conservatives score higher on certain aspects of conscientiousness, such as need for order, discipline, achievement-striving, and rule-following.

Openness to new experiences was the single biggest regional personality predictor of the percentage of the statewide vote cast for Democratic or Republican presidential candidates in the past three elections," Jost told the symposium. This was true even after adjusting for sociodemographic and political factors like population density and average income, he said.

The idea that liberals are more open to change was also reflected in a study in which nearly 900 college students were asked to rate Republican candidate John McCain and Democratic hopeful Barack Obama on the five basic personality traits, Jost reported. Obama was rated as more open to new ideas by liberals, conservatives, and moderates. Conscientiousness was not universally assigned to the conservative candidate, however. In this case, each candidate was rated as more conscientious by his supporters, with moderates only slightly favoring McCain on this measure, Jost said.

Is the correlation between openness, conscientiousness, and political attitudes a general phenomenon that persists over time? To find out, Jost and colleagues conducted a meta-analysis of 88 studies of cognitive differences underlying political orientation conducted over a 44-year period that assessed 22,000 people from 12 countries. Based on these studies they proposed that "conservatives differ from liberals in their general preference for stability and social order over social change, and their relative acceptance of social and economic forms of inequality or hierarchy as natural and/or legitimate."

Furthermore, Jost said, conservative preferences for stability and hierarchy can be enhanced during times of perceived uncertainty and threat. Research indicates, for example, that when the Department of Homeland Security raises the nation's terror alert level, people tend to rate themselves as more conservative across a whole spectrum of issues, not just those concerning national security, said Jost. They also tend to be more closed-minded under such conditions. Values of stability and hierarchy can provide reassurance in the face of apparent danger, he suggested.

But if research reveals that there are such differences between conservatives and liberals, where do these preferences come from? Some researchers believe that studying brain activity could provide some clues.

Because Jost's psychological studies suggested that conservatives are more resistant to change, David Amodio, assistant professor of psychology at NYU, asked whether this tendency might be evident in very basic patterns of neural responses. "Compared to conservatives, maybe liberals are more adept at processing information that is new and unexpected," hypothesized Amodio. Instead of using purely psychological approaches, he turned to neurological tests to help get at this question, administering a simple test called the Go/NoGo test to 43 college students as they were monitored by electroencephalography (EEG). The Go/NoGo test measures one's ability to inhibit a response to a negative cue (NoGo) after having been primed to make that response by encountering the positive cue (Go) at a much higher frequency.

The dorsal region of the anterior cingulate cortex has been associated with a mechanism for detecting whether the action one is about to take conflicts with incoming information, suggesting you should do something else instead, said Amodio. More activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, as measured by EEG, correlated with better restraint on the NoGo trials—and with more liberal political attitudes.

Based on these results, Amodio argued that ideological differences may relate to fundamental differences in the way individuals perceive information. This view complements previous assumptions that political attitudes result from one's family, social, or cultural environment, said Amodio. But he acknowledged that there are many steps between the basic neural response he measured and complex political behaviors and thoughts.

Cognitive neuroscientist Elizabeth Phelps sounded a cautionary note about functional brain imaging studies aimed at understanding complex traits such as political ideology. Brain imaging is a very young field and deciding how to interpret the results is still hotly debated. Phelps emphasized that only three studies have been published using functional MRI (fMRI) to investigate the neural basis of political attitudes. There is almost no overlap in the brain regions they report on and nothing consistent emerged in the three studies because they used different tasks and different baseline measures, she said. Because this research is in its infancy, it would be premature to draw any strong conclusions until many more studies, which are underway, are completed.

Phelps was particularly critical of a study published in the Opinion section of The New York Times in November 2007. This research, which was not peer-reviewed, claimed to analyze the political situation at the start of the 2007 primary season based on the activity of different brain regions in response to pictures of the candidates. "The main thing you need to know is that for most complex social behaviors there is not a one-to-one correspondence between a particular region and a behavior," she said.

She argued, rather, that work in areas such as neuroeconomics and decision-making, which use a wide variety of tools and have a longer history, are currently more useful in understanding the choices people make. Work from her lab, for example, has shown that giving people information about another's character makes them more likely to ignore feedback that could be used to decide how they will interact with that person. This behavior was reflected in decreased activity in the caudate region of the striatum, which responds when new information helps one learn about a person's reputation.

Psychological and neurological studies examining political attitudes are likely to become increasingly important as the tools for understanding brain function improve. Amodio speculated that the information gathered from studies such as his would not only be useful in describing how we vote, but could also be used to tailor political messages to particular audiences. Such work could raise many questions about why we vote the way we do and how the political process works.