Pacific Standard
August 10, 2012
Ever wonder why your stance on such hot-button issues as immigration or gay marriage feels so self-evident, while someone else finds the opposite opinion so obviously correct? There are various reasons for this, but researchers have just documented a startlingly basic one:
Your brain is different from his brain.
A research team led by Gary Lewis, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Sage Center for the Study of the Mind, has found structural differences between the brains of individuals who have different moral values.
We’re not just talking about differences in the way the brains function. Rather, they have documented significant variations in the actual volume of gray matter. That’s a big deal, and it “suggests a biological basis for moral sentiment,” Lewis and his colleagues write in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.
“This does not explain political attitudes, but it improves our explanation of political attitudes,” said New York University psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who developed the framework of moral attitudes used by Lewis and his team, but did not participate in the study. “Slight differences in brain structure and function make people more prone to develop one ideology or another.
“Having these pictures will make it easier for people to believe that, when we look at questions like taxes or gay marriage or work-to-welfare rules, we’re not perceiving the same reality.”
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| Images of specific regions of the brain show differences between people with different moral values, especially on issues related to purity (center right), and in-group loyalty (lower right). (Courtesy Gary Lewis) |
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