Psychology Department, Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts 02155, USA.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2010 Jun;5(2-3):349-55. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsp046. Epub 2009 Dec 5.
Voting to determine one's leaders is among the most important decisions we make, yet little is known about the brain's role in how we come to these decisions. Behavioral studies have indicated that snap judgments of political candidates' faces can predict election outcomes but that the traits that lead to these judgments differ across cultures. Here we sought to investigate the neural basis for these judgments. American and Japanese natives performed simulated voting judgments of actual American and Japanese political candidates while neural activity was measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Candidates for whom participants chose to vote elicited stronger responses in the bilateral amygdala than candidates for whom participants chose not to vote. This was true regardless of either the participant's culture or the target's culture, suggesting that these voting decisions provoked the same neural response cross-culturally. In addition, we observed a participant culture by target culture interaction in the bilateral amygdala. American and Japanese participants both showed a stronger response to cultural outgroup faces than they did to cultural in group faces, however this was unrelated to their voting decisions. These data provide insight to the mechanisms that underlie our snap judgments of others when making voting decisions and provide a neural correlate to cross-cultural consensus in social inferences.
投票决定领导人是我们做出的最重要的决定之一，但我们对大脑在这些决策中所起的作用知之甚少。行为研究表明，对政治候选人面部的快速判断可以预测选举结果，但导致这些判断的特征因文化而异。在这里，我们试图研究这些判断的神经基础。美国和日本本地人在进行模拟投票判断时，使用功能磁共振成像（fMRI）测量了他们的神经活动。与参与者选择不投票的候选人相比，参与者选择投票的候选人在双侧杏仁核中引起了更强的反应。无论参与者的文化或目标的文化如何，这都是如此，这表明这些投票决策在跨文化背景下引起了相同的神经反应。此外，我们在双侧杏仁核中观察到参与者文化与目标文化的相互作用。美国和日本参与者对文化外群体的面孔的反应都比他们对文化内群体的面孔的反应更强，然而，这与他们的投票决定无关。这些数据为我们在做出投票决定时对他人的快速判断所依据的机制提供了深入的了解，并为社会推理中的跨文化共识提供了神经相关物。
