this is a picture of me when I was much
younger 25 years ago leaving University
and when I was a student I’d been
thinking about the big questions about
the meaning of life the universe and
everything and in particular I’ve been
thinking about our human nature when I
was at university I read the work of
John Locke who is telling me that we
were a blank slate that could be written
on by experience I was reading the work
of BF Skinner a psychologist who had
pioneered behaviorism and argued that we
could be understood as a consequence of
our behaviors as the responses to the
stimuli in our environment and I read
the work of Adam Smith who argued that
we were often driven by rational
self-interest I heard these scholars I
read their ideas I believed them but I
was wrong
and here’s a few years later I went to
law school and I was reading I was
supposed to be reading contracts but
instead was reading Scientific American
and I came upon the work of a guy named
Marcus reichal he’s a neuroscientist and
and researcher who is quite fascinated
with whether we could use this new
technique of MRI in the context of
functional MRI measuring changes very
tiny changes in blood flow to particular
brain regions with the idea that the
hungry neurons in the specific brain
regions we’re gonna need more metabolic
energy to do the things that he was
asking them to do in the scanner and
have them do things like conjugate verbs
in a foreign language or do math
problems or rotate an object in their
imaginations and he had them do this
while he was taking images at the very
beginning when they had first learned to
do the task and after they’d gotten a
chance to practice it a bit what he
noticed where there were dramatic
differences in the amount of blood flow
going to those regions that we knew were
involved in some of these tasks this
allowed us in this research looking at
novices and sophisticates people who
done a task and then when they practiced
again to get some ideas about the brain
regions involved in those tasks so I
went became a lawyer
got bored of being a lawyer and decided
to go off and get a PhD in political
science and what he discovered while I
was in political science classes in my
very first year was that when that when
we look at people who know a lot about
politics they appear to think
differently than people who don’t know
much about politics this work had been
going off since the beginning of the
work in surveys where we could gather
data of this type and it led me to think
back to this study by Marcus Reich oh
and I thought you know maybe we could
use brain imaging to look at people who
knew a lot about politics and compare
them with people who didn’t know much
about politics my adviser thought this
was not going to be productive idea
perhaps at first go but I pushed a
little bit and he encouraged me and I
suggested that we could look at people
who were members of the ECL a Democrat
club members that were member members of
UCL a Republican Club and compare them
while they were answering political and
non-political questions with people who
didn’t know very much about politics I
was expecting at this time that there
would be a lot of difference in the
frontal lobes of the brain because the
frontal lobe is involved in rational
decision-making and a lot of executive
functions and has grown dramatically in
our species over the last three million
years we’ve had this a hundred thousand
new neurons have been added every
generation as our frontal lobes and
other regions of the brain have expanded
and we become much more powerful this is
what I expected frontal lobe activation
and I was wrong turns out that the data
was a lot more messy than that and it
wasn’t going at all what I was expecting
that the Democrats the Republicans
brains actually looked really similar
when they were doing these tasks when
they were thinking about politics their
brains were so similar that one of the
reviewers of this paper when it was
being reviewed thought we’d actually
copied the same image twice and made a
mistake in the in the way we were
submitting it this led me to believe
that perhaps Republicans and Democrats
think about the world in exactly the
same way using the same mechanisms to
process the world but again I was wrong
and I’ll tell you more about that in a
minute to try and understand the data
that I’d had though initially I went
ended up going back to the work by
Markus Reichel and Marcus raikou after
doing these initial experiments compared
people’s brains when they were doing
tasks conjugating verbs or doing math or
rotating objects in their minds he would
compare them to their brains when they
were just laying in the scanner at rest
but he had that next level in sight
which was what’s going on in the brain
when you’re at rest so he subtracted out
the activity that been going on during
the tasks to see what parts the brain
were most active when we were at rest
what he discovers is an area of the
brain and network of regions that he
describes as the default mode Network
this is a set of regions of the brain
that he’s consuming 20% of our metabolic
energy that’s going to our brain it was
just an incredible amount for a part of
the brain that basically shuts off when
we try to do anything so this was a
puzzle what is going on in this resting
brain that turns off when we think about
the world well it turns out that the
activity that I had discovered in the
politically sophisticated people was the
same pattern of activity that had been
decreasing during the technical tasks
when he discovered what I discovered was
that we saw a pattern of activation in
these regions in this default mode
Network when politically knowledgeable
people were thinking about politics what
this led me to understand was that for
political novices thinking about
politics was essentially like taking an
exam in school it was some kind of verb
conjugation math test with object
rotation it was really difficult but for
the political sophisticates but people
who thought about national politics all
the time it increased in activity when
they were thinking about politics as if
it was another type of social activity
lots of the social activities that we
studied after the initial work by rykel
had shown at increases in the default
mode Network when we were when people
were doing office politics or family
politics or church politics it turns out
the same subjects that I damage that
were political novices in national
politics could also use their brains
just the same way when they’re thinking
about the politics of everyday life this
led me to believe that your brain is
built for politics the reason that we
have the very brains that we have is to
solve the problems of being a political
animal this is sometimes known as the
social brain hypothesis but I think
that’s a bit of a misnomer
there’s lots of different ways of being
social fish go to schools and ants have
colonies and bees fly around together
but if we look at ants when they’re
having social interaction you don’t need
to know much if you’re an ant to figure
out whether somebody’s a friend or a foe
just give them a quick sniff and you can
tell what they’ve got the right
pheromones for being a political animal
however it’s much more complicated
dolphins hyenas elephants chimpanzees a
variety of different political animals
have very complex dynamic social lives
that require tremendous amount of
cognition to keep track of the various
relationships that they have because
these coalition’s are constantly
shifting if you’re a dolphin you might
go swimming and hunting with one dolphin
today and a different dolphin tomorrow
you might be forming a little cluster of
ana pod today but a different pod
tomorrow and when I lived in San Diego
every once in a while there’d be mega
pods of hundreds even thousands of
dolphins gathering together in the ocean
you can’t as a political animal just go
up and sniff somebody at your office
meeting if you’re trying to figure out
whether they’re gonna work with you work
against you at the next project that
you’re working on being a human is much
more difficult our coalition’s are
constantly shifting and constantly
dynamic we’re together today for the
first time as a group and probably will
never be together again that’s the
nature of being the kind of animals that
we are to understand this more I looked
at people who were gambling I got data
of their brains and their behaviors
while they were engaged in gambling
behaviors what we discovered was what we
thought it what I thought at first in
this work was that perhaps we’d be able
to look at the behaviors of Republicans
and Democrats and tell their political
ideology based on the pattern of
behavior while they were gambling but I
was wrong it turns out that when you go
and you look at the data Republicans and
Democrats
gambled exactly the same way you cannot
go to Las Vegas and see the differences
in political party identity by looking
at the way they’ve gamble in Vegas or in
Lohr in Monaco that just isn’t going to
help you at all to be able to understand
damn this further I thought perhaps I
could look at their brains but seeing
that the behaviors were identical I
thought well maybe their brains are
gonna be processing this task exactly
the same as well but I was wrong
turns out we could classify people with
eighty-three percent accuracy simply by
looking at their brains when they were
gambling this blew my doors off I had no
way of expecting that we find such
dramatic differences for people who were
Democrats we identified an increase in a
region of the brain known as the
posterior insula this is a part of the
brain that is active when you’ve got a
stomachache or you’re feeling your heart
beat it allows in tarot section the
feeling of your own feelings for people
who were Republicans what we discovered
was an increase in activity in the brain
and a region known as the amygdala this
is a part of the brain that’s involved
in processing threat and fear but a wide
range of other emotions this was
particularly astonishing to me because
83% accuracy just wasn’t what we were
expecting we’d known for many years in
political science that we can classify
somebody as being Republican or Democrat
based on their parents political
affiliation we could classify you with
about a sixty-nine percent accuracy for
I know the party affiliation of your
parents but it’s much more difficult to
do that when we’re looking at other at
other data that we have when we know
your parents I know a lot about your
socioeconomic status and your education
your geography languages religious
beliefs upbringing and I even know all
of your DNA because I know that you get
all of your DNA from your biological
parents so we could classify people
better with this gambling data from
their brains than we could from knowing
all that we know from their parents this
was really surprising because the model
in political science has been a
socialization model that encountering
political parties in the political world
lets us know about the choices that
we’re going to face and shapes our
political minds and perhaps our
political brains but more recently we’ve
been learning about the role of biology
we’ve been learning that if we study
monozygotic and dizygotic identical and
fraternal twins and we compare their
correlate
it explains about 40% of the of the
political ideology that they have about
40% of your political ideology is
attributable then to biological sources
so I thought perhaps that this data was
telling us that the strong results we
were getting by looking at people’s
brains was because it was being driven
by biology but again I was wrong it
turns out that our results are simply
too strong to be accounted for by
biology alone the results were getting
are too strong to be just DNA in fact
the understanding that I have now is
that our political mind is a consequence
of those environmental influences the
socialization that we’ve talked about
the role of biology but also the choices
we make about who to affiliate with and
where we’re gonna vote where we’re gonna
live the choices that we make on a
regular day I used to believe that we
were hardwired in our political
attitudes I thought that we were like a
computer circuit board that was gonna be
permanently affixed in a particular way
but I was wrong what I believe now
instead is that were hardwired not to be
hardwired the very challenge of being a
political animal living in a world of
constantly shifting coalition’s means
that we need to have the kind of
flexible minds that have evolved service
as political animals we live in a time
where there’s a lot of political
conflict there’s a lot of strife there’s
a lot of disagreement among people where
we think differently than others and
worry that will we ever be able to get
along but the data that I’ve got gives
me a lot of hope for the future
we’re not like ants with hardwired
enemies and hard wired friends rather
the experimental work shows that it’s
really hard to get people to not
cooperate we have a tendency to want to
help each other we I want to we want to
be nice to each other it turns out that
it is very easy to shift coalition’s
with very minimal changes in stimuli we
can get people to work together who’ve
never worked these work together before
this work gives me a lot of hope that
because our brains were are built for
politics and
hard-wired not to be hardwired old
enemies can become new friends but I’ve been wrong before
younger 25 years ago leaving University
and when I was a student I’d been
thinking about the big questions about
the meaning of life the universe and
everything and in particular I’ve been
thinking about our human nature when I
was at university I read the work of
John Locke who is telling me that we
were a blank slate that could be written
on by experience I was reading the work
of BF Skinner a psychologist who had
pioneered behaviorism and argued that we
could be understood as a consequence of
our behaviors as the responses to the
stimuli in our environment and I read
the work of Adam Smith who argued that
we were often driven by rational
self-interest I heard these scholars I
read their ideas I believed them but I
was wrong
and here’s a few years later I went to
law school and I was reading I was
supposed to be reading contracts but
instead was reading Scientific American
and I came upon the work of a guy named
Marcus reichal he’s a neuroscientist and
and researcher who is quite fascinated
with whether we could use this new
technique of MRI in the context of
functional MRI measuring changes very
tiny changes in blood flow to particular
brain regions with the idea that the
hungry neurons in the specific brain
regions we’re gonna need more metabolic
energy to do the things that he was
asking them to do in the scanner and
have them do things like conjugate verbs
in a foreign language or do math
problems or rotate an object in their
imaginations and he had them do this
while he was taking images at the very
beginning when they had first learned to
do the task and after they’d gotten a
chance to practice it a bit what he
noticed where there were dramatic
differences in the amount of blood flow
going to those regions that we knew were
involved in some of these tasks this
allowed us in this research looking at
novices and sophisticates people who
done a task and then when they practiced
again to get some ideas about the brain
regions involved in those tasks so I
went became a lawyer
got bored of being a lawyer and decided
to go off and get a PhD in political
science and what he discovered while I
was in political science classes in my
very first year was that when that when
we look at people who know a lot about
politics they appear to think
differently than people who don’t know
much about politics this work had been
going off since the beginning of the
work in surveys where we could gather
data of this type and it led me to think
back to this study by Marcus Reich oh
and I thought you know maybe we could
use brain imaging to look at people who
knew a lot about politics and compare
them with people who didn’t know much
about politics my adviser thought this
was not going to be productive idea
perhaps at first go but I pushed a
little bit and he encouraged me and I
suggested that we could look at people
who were members of the ECL a Democrat
club members that were member members of
UCL a Republican Club and compare them
while they were answering political and
non-political questions with people who
didn’t know very much about politics I
was expecting at this time that there
would be a lot of difference in the
frontal lobes of the brain because the
frontal lobe is involved in rational
decision-making and a lot of executive
functions and has grown dramatically in
our species over the last three million
years we’ve had this a hundred thousand
new neurons have been added every
generation as our frontal lobes and
other regions of the brain have expanded
and we become much more powerful this is
what I expected frontal lobe activation
and I was wrong turns out that the data
was a lot more messy than that and it
wasn’t going at all what I was expecting
that the Democrats the Republicans
brains actually looked really similar
when they were doing these tasks when
they were thinking about politics their
brains were so similar that one of the
reviewers of this paper when it was
being reviewed thought we’d actually
copied the same image twice and made a
mistake in the in the way we were
submitting it this led me to believe
that perhaps Republicans and Democrats
think about the world in exactly the
same way using the same mechanisms to
process the world but again I was wrong
and I’ll tell you more about that in a
minute to try and understand the data
that I’d had though initially I went
ended up going back to the work by
Markus Reichel and Marcus raikou after
doing these initial experiments compared
people’s brains when they were doing
tasks conjugating verbs or doing math or
rotating objects in their minds he would
compare them to their brains when they
were just laying in the scanner at rest
but he had that next level in sight
which was what’s going on in the brain
when you’re at rest so he subtracted out
the activity that been going on during
the tasks to see what parts the brain
were most active when we were at rest
what he discovers is an area of the
brain and network of regions that he
describes as the default mode Network
this is a set of regions of the brain
that he’s consuming 20% of our metabolic
energy that’s going to our brain it was
just an incredible amount for a part of
the brain that basically shuts off when
we try to do anything so this was a
puzzle what is going on in this resting
brain that turns off when we think about
the world well it turns out that the
activity that I had discovered in the
politically sophisticated people was the
same pattern of activity that had been
decreasing during the technical tasks
when he discovered what I discovered was
that we saw a pattern of activation in
these regions in this default mode
Network when politically knowledgeable
people were thinking about politics what
this led me to understand was that for
political novices thinking about
politics was essentially like taking an
exam in school it was some kind of verb
conjugation math test with object
rotation it was really difficult but for
the political sophisticates but people
who thought about national politics all
the time it increased in activity when
they were thinking about politics as if
it was another type of social activity
lots of the social activities that we
studied after the initial work by rykel
had shown at increases in the default
mode Network when we were when people
were doing office politics or family
politics or church politics it turns out
the same subjects that I damage that
were political novices in national
politics could also use their brains
just the same way when they’re thinking
about the politics of everyday life this
led me to believe that your brain is
built for politics the reason that we
have the very brains that we have is to
solve the problems of being a political
animal this is sometimes known as the
social brain hypothesis but I think
that’s a bit of a misnomer
there’s lots of different ways of being
social fish go to schools and ants have
colonies and bees fly around together
but if we look at ants when they’re
having social interaction you don’t need
to know much if you’re an ant to figure
out whether somebody’s a friend or a foe
just give them a quick sniff and you can
tell what they’ve got the right
pheromones for being a political animal
however it’s much more complicated
dolphins hyenas elephants chimpanzees a
variety of different political animals
have very complex dynamic social lives
that require tremendous amount of
cognition to keep track of the various
relationships that they have because
these coalition’s are constantly
shifting if you’re a dolphin you might
go swimming and hunting with one dolphin
today and a different dolphin tomorrow
you might be forming a little cluster of
ana pod today but a different pod
tomorrow and when I lived in San Diego
every once in a while there’d be mega
pods of hundreds even thousands of
dolphins gathering together in the ocean
you can’t as a political animal just go
up and sniff somebody at your office
meeting if you’re trying to figure out
whether they’re gonna work with you work
against you at the next project that
you’re working on being a human is much
more difficult our coalition’s are
constantly shifting and constantly
dynamic we’re together today for the
first time as a group and probably will
never be together again that’s the
nature of being the kind of animals that
we are to understand this more I looked
at people who were gambling I got data
of their brains and their behaviors
while they were engaged in gambling
behaviors what we discovered was what we
thought it what I thought at first in
this work was that perhaps we’d be able
to look at the behaviors of Republicans
and Democrats and tell their political
ideology based on the pattern of
behavior while they were gambling but I
was wrong it turns out that when you go
and you look at the data Republicans and
Democrats
gambled exactly the same way you cannot
go to Las Vegas and see the differences
in political party identity by looking
at the way they’ve gamble in Vegas or in
Lohr in Monaco that just isn’t going to
help you at all to be able to understand
damn this further I thought perhaps I
could look at their brains but seeing
that the behaviors were identical I
thought well maybe their brains are
gonna be processing this task exactly
the same as well but I was wrong
turns out we could classify people with
eighty-three percent accuracy simply by
looking at their brains when they were
gambling this blew my doors off I had no
way of expecting that we find such
dramatic differences for people who were
Democrats we identified an increase in a
region of the brain known as the
posterior insula this is a part of the
brain that is active when you’ve got a
stomachache or you’re feeling your heart
beat it allows in tarot section the
feeling of your own feelings for people
who were Republicans what we discovered
was an increase in activity in the brain
and a region known as the amygdala this
is a part of the brain that’s involved
in processing threat and fear but a wide
range of other emotions this was
particularly astonishing to me because
83% accuracy just wasn’t what we were
expecting we’d known for many years in
political science that we can classify
somebody as being Republican or Democrat
based on their parents political
affiliation we could classify you with
about a sixty-nine percent accuracy for
I know the party affiliation of your
parents but it’s much more difficult to
do that when we’re looking at other at
other data that we have when we know
your parents I know a lot about your
socioeconomic status and your education
your geography languages religious
beliefs upbringing and I even know all
of your DNA because I know that you get
all of your DNA from your biological
parents so we could classify people
better with this gambling data from
their brains than we could from knowing
all that we know from their parents this
was really surprising because the model
in political science has been a
socialization model that encountering
political parties in the political world
lets us know about the choices that
we’re going to face and shapes our
political minds and perhaps our
political brains but more recently we’ve
been learning about the role of biology
we’ve been learning that if we study
monozygotic and dizygotic identical and
fraternal twins and we compare their
correlate
it explains about 40% of the of the
political ideology that they have about
40% of your political ideology is
attributable then to biological sources
so I thought perhaps that this data was
telling us that the strong results we
were getting by looking at people’s
brains was because it was being driven
by biology but again I was wrong it
turns out that our results are simply
too strong to be accounted for by
biology alone the results were getting
are too strong to be just DNA in fact
the understanding that I have now is
that our political mind is a consequence
of those environmental influences the
socialization that we’ve talked about
the role of biology but also the choices
we make about who to affiliate with and
where we’re gonna vote where we’re gonna
live the choices that we make on a
regular day I used to believe that we
were hardwired in our political
attitudes I thought that we were like a
computer circuit board that was gonna be
permanently affixed in a particular way
but I was wrong what I believe now
instead is that were hardwired not to be
hardwired the very challenge of being a
political animal living in a world of
constantly shifting coalition’s means
that we need to have the kind of
flexible minds that have evolved service
as political animals we live in a time
where there’s a lot of political
conflict there’s a lot of strife there’s
a lot of disagreement among people where
we think differently than others and
worry that will we ever be able to get
along but the data that I’ve got gives
me a lot of hope for the future
we’re not like ants with hardwired
enemies and hard wired friends rather
the experimental work shows that it’s
really hard to get people to not
cooperate we have a tendency to want to
help each other we I want to we want to
be nice to each other it turns out that
it is very easy to shift coalition’s
with very minimal changes in stimuli we
can get people to work together who’ve
never worked these work together before
this work gives me a lot of hope that
because our brains were are built for
politics and
hard-wired not to be hardwired old
enemies can become new friends but I’ve been wrong before
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