Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912.
Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY 10002.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2021 May 18;118(20). doi: 10.1073/pnas.2022491118.
Political partisans see the world through an ideologically biased lens. What drives political polarization? Although it has been posited that polarization arises because of an inability to tolerate uncertainty and a need to hold predictable beliefs about the world, evidence for this hypothesis remains elusive. We examined the relationship between uncertainty tolerance and political polarization using a combination of brain-to-brain synchrony and intersubject representational similarity analysis, which measured committed liberals' and conservatives' ( = 44) subjective interpretation of naturalistic political video material. Shared ideology between participants increased neural synchrony throughout the brain during a polarizing political debate filled with provocative language but not during a neutrally worded news clip on polarized topics or a nonpolitical documentary. During the political debate, neural synchrony in mentalizing and valuation networks was modulated by one's aversion to uncertainty: Uncertainty-intolerant individuals experienced greater brain-to-brain synchrony with politically like-minded peers and lower synchrony with political opponents-an effect observed for liberals and conservatives alike. Moreover, the greater the neural synchrony between committed partisans, the more likely that two individuals formed similar, polarized attitudes about the debate. These results suggest that uncertainty attitudes gate the shared neural processing of political narratives, thereby fueling polarized attitude formation about hot-button issues.
政治派别人士透过意识形态偏见的镜头看世界。政治两极化的原因是什么?虽然有人假设两极化是由于无法容忍不确定性和对世界持有可预测的信念的需要,但这一假设的证据仍然难以捉摸。我们使用脑间同步和主体间代表性相似性分析相结合的方法,研究了不确定性容忍度与政治极化之间的关系,该方法测量了坚定的自由派和保守派(n = 44)对自然主义政治视频材料的主观解释。参与者之间的共同意识形态在充满挑衅性语言的极化政治辩论中增加了整个大脑的神经同步,但在关于极化主题的中性措辞新闻片段或非政治纪录片中则没有。在政治辩论中,思维和评估网络中的神经同步受到一个人对不确定性的厌恶的调节:不确定性容忍度低的个体与政治上志同道合的同龄人经历了更大的大脑间同步,与政治对手的同步性较低——这一效应在自由派和保守派中都观察到了。此外,坚定的党派之间的神经同步越大,两个人就越有可能对辩论形成类似的、极化的态度。这些结果表明,不确定性态度控制着政治叙事的共享神经处理,从而加剧了对热门问题的极化态度形成。
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