[View here as a Twitter thread]
thread) How to bridge the great divide? Maybe by understanding? I found this study interesting. “Liberals and Conservatives have different brain types.” Here’s a quick summary of this study from Current Biology: cell.com/current-biolog…
2/ Reminder: the Repub. Party is no longer conservative; it’s authoritarian. Which is what Jeff Flake was sort of explaining here: twitter.com/kylegriffin1/s… … Conservative=fearful of rapid change Authoritarian=fear of complexity
3/ BTW, if you understand this, you stop being surprised by Nunes, Hannity, Trump, etc: they’re behaving exactly as you expect. (Shocked yes, surprised, no.) So, anyway, according to the study, self-identified conservatives have a larger amygdala than liberals.
4/ The size of the amygdala correlates to increased fearfulness. Conservatives thus experience the world as a more fearful place, and are more fearful of rapid change (which can be very destabilizing).
5/ Liberals, OTOH, have more matter in the anterior cingulate cortex, the part that helps people cope w/ complexity Liberals are more comfortable with complexity and nuance. (hence opposite of authoritarians) More about authoritarianism here:
6/ . . . toward authoritarianism see academics as out of touch brainwashers who dismiss opposing ideas as bigoted & ignorant.
Trump rose to power on a backlash against multiculturalism and diversity; his voters will follow him anywhere because he is one of them.
— Teri Kanefield (@Teri_Kanefield) March 12, 2018
