Bonjour à tous,

Je suis tombé sur cet article en parcourant le net sur le sujet des croyances politiques:

http://www.nature.com/articles/srep39589

Voici leur conclusion:

Our results show that when people are confronted with challenges to their deeply held beliefs, they preferentially engage brain structures known to support stimulus-independent, internally directed cognition. Our data also support the role of emotion in belief persistence.

Il semblerait que l'article mette en évidence une réaction neurologique plus importante de défense lors de contre-arguments qui s'opposent à une vision politique que par rapport à nos contre-arguments non-politiques:

First, belief change is intentionally confounded with belief content: as predicted, participants were more likely to change their beliefs for non-political statements than for political statements.

Qu'en pensez-vous?

L'échantillon est biaisé : il n'y avait que des gauchistes dont il est avéré qu'ils sont immunisés contre la réalité des faits

C'est en effet une des limites de l'étude:

Given that all of our participants were strong liberals, it is not clear how well these results would generalize to conservatives, or to people with less polarized beliefs. Several studies have found structural or functional differences between the brains of conservatives and liberals (59,60). One specifically relevant difference is the finding of larger right amygdala volume in conservatives (61). Relatedly, conservatism tends to be associated with increased threat avoidance (62). In our data, activity in the amygdala when beliefs were challenged was associated with increased resistance to belief change. We note that while our participants expressed trait liberalism, in the context of this experiment they were motivated to conserve their specific beliefs against a direct threat.

59:
SpoilAfficherMasquer Political scientists and psychologists have noted that, on average, conservatives show more structured and persistent cognitive styles, whereas liberals are more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty. We tested the hypothesis that these profiles relate to difference in general neurocogntive functioning using event-related potentials, and found that greater liberalism was associated with stronger conflict-related anterior cingulate activity, suggesting greater neurocognitive sensitivity to cues for altering a habitual response pattern.

60:
SpoilAfficherMasquerWe found that three independent dimensions explained the variability of a set of statements expressing political beliefs and that each dimension was reflected in a distinctive pattern of neural activation: individualism (medial prefrontal cortex and temporoparietal junction), conservatism (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex), and radicalism (ventral striatum and posterior cingulate). The structures we identified are also known to be important in self–other processing, social decision-making in ambivalent situations, and reward prediction. Our results extend current knowledge on the neural correlates of the structure of political beliefs, a fundamental aspect of the human ability to coalesce into social entities.

61:
SpoilAfficherMasquerWe found that greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala. These results were replicated in an independent sample of addnl. participants. Our findings extend previous observations that political attitudes reflect differences in self-regulatory conflict monitoring and recognition of emotional faces by showing that such attitudes are reflected in human brain structure. Although our data do not determine whether these regions play a causal role in the formation of political attitudes, they converge with previous work to suggest a possible link between brain structure and psychol. mechanisms that mediate political attitudes.

62:
SpoilAfficherMasquerStudies from neuroscience and genetics suggest that right- (vs. left-) wing orientation is associated with greater neural sensitivity to threat and larger amygdala volume, as well as less sensitivity to response conflict and smaller anterior cingulate volume.

ça ne m'étonne pas, je me dis que l'ego s'assimile aux idées, et quand on remet en question les idées, l'ego se sent forcément menacé, d'où des réactions passionnelles (et vite fait apparaissent les ad hominem, insultes et compagnie...). C'est en conséquence extrêmement difficile d'avoir des débats raisonnables sur les sujets politiques (et bien plus, j'ai bien vu des gens se disputer pour une histoire de temps de cuisson d'un steak). L'ego est une plaie, il faut donc avant toute chose être attentif aux tours que nous nous jouons à nous même.

C'est à ça que sert l'apprentissage de savoir tenir des débats. Se décentrer et se tournver vers la Vérité plutôt que vers la protection de son propre égo. Il faut que les libéraux en prennent de la graine ainsi ils pourront aisément comprendre que quand 8 hommes détiennent autant que 3,3 milliards, c'est que leur systéme ne marche pas. Il en faut pas plus pour ne pas être libéral pour un être qui est capable de mettre son égo de côté et de comprendre que la politique est censé organiser un tout en vu du plus grand bonheur de tous.

L'éthique du débat permettrait fondamentalement de libérer du fond