Your reaction to a gross photo can predict your politics

(Image credit: iStock)

last updated 8 January 2015

A study published by Virginia Tech professor P. Read Montague in Current Biology indicates that brain scans taken while people look at disturbing images can accurately predict their political leanings.

Titled, "Nonpolitical Images Evoke Neural Predictors of Political Ideology," the research was able to sort participants into liberal and conservative categories based on their brain's reaction to a picture of a mutilated animal carcass. However, while subconscious brain activity was divided by political affiliation, that activity did not correlate to the subjects' conscious experience of the photo.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.