02/24: YC Leong

[ehuppert]

Comment below with a well-developed group question about the reading for this week's workshop. Please collaborate with your groups on Hypothesis (via the Canvas page) to develop your question.

One person can submit on the group's behalf and put the Group Name in the submission for credit. Your group only needs to post on assigned week (rotating every other week).

Please post your question by Wednesday 11:59 PM, and upvote at least three of your peers' comments on Thursday prior to the workshop. Everyone in the group needs to upvote! You need to use 'thumbs-up' for your reactions to count towards 'top comments,' but you can use other emojis on top of the thumbs up.

[Thiyaghessan]

Group 2A: Thiyaghessan (*), Eliot Weinstein, Sushan Zhao, Linhui Wu

Hi Professor Leong,

Thank you for taking the time to share this paper with us! I had one question regarding your analysis:

1. In the study, you indicated that neural divergence did not diverge between female and male participants. I was wondering if you had considered the effect of income on how individuals perceived these political ads. For example, Democratic Party voters are likelier to be in support of policies expanding affordable housing. However, when it is time to actually build these homes, you will have wealthier liberal areas refusing to allow construction in their neighbourhoods for a variety of reasons of which some are more aligned with a conservative worldview. There have also been similar effects when it comes to support for expanded immigration and other such policies. Have you considered exploring how income influences the extent to which liberal/conservative individuals interpret the semantic content of these videos?

[taizeyu]

2H, Taize Yu, Ning Tang, Xiaojin Zheng, Egemen Pamukcu

Dear Dr Leong

Thank you very much for providing such a meaningful speech for us. We have read the paper and I want to express our opinions. In this article, the authors characterized how political attitudes biased information processing in the brain and the result of biased proceeding for attitude change. This process is one-way. We want to know if this process also went both ways. In other words, if the information processing in the brain can also influence political attitudes. Or, if there are some factors that can influence political attitudes. In our normal eyes, brain activity always controls people’s behaviours. Some opinions or emotions, like political attitudes, are always formed by brain activity. But in this article, the process is different from our minds, which is interesting.

[JunoWuu]

Group 2E: Juno Wu, Nikki Ting, Franco Mendes, Brenda Wu

Hi Dr. Leong

We think this is a really interesting topic and some amazing findings.

1. I wonder if it is possible to use reverse correlation in this study. So for example in this study, we could find the peak of DMPFC activation and trace back to which stimuli was presented or which words were presented at that time and see if there is a general pattern in those words or sentences.
2. Another questions would be why did you choose to use videos for the study instead of audio recordings when the analysis really focuses on language used in the videos and does not mention how visual stimulus affects polarization. How do you think the results would differ given only audio, only visual, or only text stimuli, rather than audio-visual stimuli?
3. Also, While it is clear that the neural response does differ depending on political leanings , what is less clear to us is the mechanism by which this happens. Maybe people who are more conservative tend to have stronger responses (as we would expect) to the way the questions were framed. It is very clear that the questions would trigger a stronger response from conservatives. "funds constructing the wall" could have been framed as "removal of funding for the wall", this difference would probably have a similar effect on the neural response. Basically, the wording of the questions is not "neutral" rather it, by design, elicits a differentiated response as they imply a different status quo.

[Coco-Jiachen-Yu]

Hello Dr. Leong,

Our group finds your study very intriguing and we all look forward to your presentation tomorrow. We have following questions for you regarding this paper:

• I feel like 'polarization' occurs in many aspects of our life(say, polarized sentimental comments on some social media platforms, subcultural polarization among different groups) . So it is possible to use the same approach in this paper to measure our cognitive biases in other aspects? Would would be the constraints of applying it to other aspects?
• It's really interesting that the differences in political alignment caused differences in the DMPFC region of the brain, considering its association with narrative formation. We already knew that members of different political parties might have different interpretations of events, due to polarization. But it seems like differences in this region might also be associated with just understanding different events which have happened, if that makes any sense. Have you seen anything of the sort?
• The findings are really interesting in this study. I wonder whether attitudinal changes (e.g., shifting from one political party to another) will alter brain activities consequently.
• I wonder how you would justify the causality between information and rising political polarization when the paper mainly focuses on examining how brain activities shape our ideology. For instance, is the rising polarization due to more advanced political propaganda tactics nowadays or are there any other reasons?

[AlexPrizzy]

Group 2L: Jingwen Ni, Alex Przybycin, Allison Towey, David Xu, Sirui Zhou

This study was conducted with American participants and stimuli were of current highly controversial American political videos, in which emotional language was shown to cause neuronal polarization, while greater emotional reactions could have been elicited due to participants personal connection to political issues. What if participants were placed in a bystander point of view? Would MDPFC activity such as in this study be seen in American participants if the videos were unrelated to American issues? What if a video was shown that aligned with both conservative and liberal views but for different reasons? For example, if a video of a foreign country which opposes religious freedom was shown (which may not align with the views of liberals who support religious freedom and religious conservatives), would this polarization of neuronal activity still be present?

[AlexBWilliamson]

Group 2D: Yijing Zhang, Chuqing Zhao, Mike Packard, Alex Williamson

Our group had two questions. First, based on your research, do you think that differences in political beliefs are what cause the change in brain patterns that you observed? Or is it the differences in patterns that drives political beliefs?

Second, the paper shows that “polarized neural responses are correlated with attitude change in response to the videos,” meaning that if you have a “conservative” or “liberal” brain pattern you are more likely to move even further in that direction in response to the video. we were wondering if this says more about the particular style of messaging being used than the people being studied. Could future research explore kinds of narratives or media that both (a) reveal neural polarization and (b) cause attitudes to move more toward the center?

[yujing-syj]

Group 2M: Chenming Zhang, Chris Maurice, Xin Su, Yujing Sun

Hi prof Leong, thanks so much for coming to our workshop. Your paper gives us very precise knowledge about how biases arise in the brain. We are very interested in this topic. Beyond that, we also have several questions.

• Your study examines the relationship between polarized neural responses and attitude change. We know for those whose neural responses was similar to that of the conservative or liberal participants, they most likely changed their attitude to conservative or liberal side. We want to know, is there any detected difference between those who changed their mind and those who didn’t? Whether the difference come from the neural or brain’s structure or just some other factors beyond the brain? How difficult is it to change people’s attitude? Whether the change is temporary or not?

• We noticed that neural polarization in DMPFC is associated with the use of moral-emotional language. Do you think the media is taking advantage of this point to advocate in these days? Is there any way that could use this finding to decrease the existing polarization?

[mdvadillo]

Group 2I: Lingfeng Shan, William Zhu, Daniela Vadillo, Zimei Xia

Hi Professor Leong, thank you for your presentation! Our group came up with the following questions:

• What iss the cause for the divergence in neural reaction between liberals and conversatives? Did key prior experiences or social environment shape their neural activity which leads to the divergence?
• How does prior knowledge and neural activity work differently for the formation of political perception? That is, to what extent will our perception be affected by neural stimuli vs our previous experience/knowledge?
• Would research participants that are trained to be more objective and critical, such as scholars, have less neural polarization when watching the same content?

[jinfei1125]

Group 2K: Baotong Zhang, Senling Shu, Jinfei Zhu(*), Koichi Onogi

Hi Prof. Leong, thanks for coming to our workshop! Our group has basically two questions: 1) As you mentioned, people with distinct political ideologies would interpret the identical contents differently, I was just wondering whether such a political divergence is inevitable? 2) Preexisting political attitudes influence the response to political information. Without preexisting political attitudes, how does the brain process political information?

[helyap]

Hi Professor Leong,

Thank you for sharing your research illuminating neural mechanisms correlated with political polarization.

Below are a few questions that surfaced in our reading of the article:

1. Are there any “costs” to oppositional changes in DMPFC activity? How would DMPFC activity look different if participants actually switched sides? And are changes in the DMPFC area correlated with changes in other areas of the brain? This set of questions stems from interest in confirmatory bias and avoidance of cognitive dissonance especially in sensitive topics such as political discourse. In short, in addition to the relation to narrative interpretation, could an additional function of the DMPFC area be related to reduction of cognitive dissonance or costs of internal conflict?  2. Separately, in relation to how political attitudes bias information processing in the brain, and since the brain appears prone to this phenomenon being ruled by political attitudes, as an individual becomes more educated, is it possible for the influence of political attitudes on the brain to gradually diminish.  Are similar experimental designs applicable to test this question?

Thank you, Group 2J (Zhe Zhang, Emily Yeh, Kuitai Wang, Helen Yap)

[ttsujikawa]

Group 2C: Fengyi Zheng, Taichi Tsujikawa, Lu Zhang, Haohan Shi:

Hi prof. Leong, I really enjoyed your research. I found it highly interesting that the research attempts to tackle issues in social science, especially political polarization, by utilizing methods from life science. I think that while people intuitively understands how political attitudes affects people's responses to public policies, it has been unclear that how and what makes them act in that way.

I was wondering if participants' political positions are rather degree than one or another (and high dimensional). How would you expect a result to be differed if you implement this research based on this notion?

Thank you!

[awaidyasin]

Group 2G: Kaylah Thomas, Shengwenxin Ni, Yao Yao, and Awaid Yasin

Hi Professor,

Thank you for your presentation. Our group has the following question:

From what we understood, your paper kind of delivers a ‘bad’ news in the sense that given a distribution of political beliefs, people are more likely to converge to the beliefs of the ‘nearest’ group of individuals. So, starting from an arbitrary polarized environment, we would eventually get more polarized as we interact with media/opinions (i.e., there is a feedback effect). We were wondering if there is a way to perhaps reverse this process? Particularly, we were thinking of videos/messages that were not emotional/moral but rather more factual or scientific. Within your work, is it possible to study the impact of such videos? We see from Figure 4 of the paper that there are ‘’quantitative’’ and ‘’number’’ categories. Would the sample size allow you to see if more factual videos have the opposite effect?

[bningdling]

Group 2F: Wenqian Zhang, Gabriel Nicholson, Xin Tang, Sophie Wang

Our group’s questions are:

1. Regarding polarized neural responses to political content, is this kind of polarized neural responses due to genetic reasons or the cultural environment the participants are in? Is it possible that certain people are more susceptible to more polarized neural responses? Would it be possible to test this with twins?

2. What about people in other minority parties, is the same thing happening to them or it's more complicated?