Neuroscience is unlocking a deeper understanding of how we choose our political affiliations. Here, I provide an insight into how this can help us regain the middle-ground.

Neuroscience has some answers as to why working and middle-class people, and even those in abject poverty, would support a movement clearly not in their own interests.

The number of studies examining how those on the right-wing think in comparison to the left is substantial. Exploring issues from general cognitive ability to IQ to verbal comprehension to autonomic responsiveness has led to a quite deep understanding of how a certain brain may be more vulnerable to right-wing rhetoric. More recently (last couple of decades), we have also ventured into brain imaging studies and even functional brain imaging. Functional brain imaging is when we scan someone’s brain as they are exposed to a certain stimulus – a political speech or advert, for example. So impressive have these results been that some studies suggest that you can predict with up to 88% accuracy whether a person is conservative or liberal based purely on their brain scan images.