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"Authoritarian attitudes linked to altered brain anatomy, neuroscientists reveal", PsyPost 4/19/2025:

A new brain imaging study published in the journal Neuroscience has found that authoritarian attitudes on both the political left and right are linked to specific structural differences in the brain. Young adults who scored higher on right-wing authoritarianism had less gray matter volume in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, a region involved in social reasoning. Meanwhile, those who endorsed more extreme forms of left-wing authoritarianism showed reduced cortical thickness in the right anterior insula, a brain area tied to empathy and emotion regulation.

The research aimed to better understand the brain-based traits that might underlie authoritarian thinking. Previous studies have documented the psychological characteristics associated with authoritarianism—such as impulsivity, dogmatism, and heightened sensitivity to threat—but few have examined whether these traits are reflected in brain structure.

The cited paper is Jésus Adrián-Ventura et al., "Authoritarianism and the brain: Structural MR correlates associated with polarized left- and right-wing ideology traits", IBRO Neuroscience 5/24/2025.

Scientific publications that correlate behavioral and biological traits are generally good for mass media click-bait. This includes "gene for X" theories, Neuropolitics, and connections between behaviorally-defined disorders and neuroanatomical differences (see e.g. here).

And this new study, as usual, offers yet another lesson in grouping-think. The cited paper doesn't offer any scatterplots illustrating (the small size of) the effects it documents, so here are some concocted examples showing what its featured correlations might look like:

Speculations about "neuropolitics" have been around for a while — a small taste of slightly earlier stuff in the media:

"Conservative and Liberal Brains Might Have Some Real Differences", Scientific American 10/26/2020
"Your brain can reveal if you’re rightwing – plus three other things it tells us about your politics", The Conversation 3/22/2025

But this new study provides some seriously impressive clickbait — "Scientists scanned the brains of authoritarians and found something weird", Futurism 4/27/2025.

May 1, 2025 @ 6:45 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Language and politics

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