Green European Journal: You lead the Neuropolitics Research Lab at the University of Edinburgh. Could you briefly explain what you do and what neuropolitics is?

Laura Cram: I come from a political science background, and for many years, I studied the European Union, European identity, and multilevel identities. But I got to a point where I often felt that the theories and empirical studies I was working on were like ships passing in the night, and there was something under the hood that we weren’t tapping into. So I retrained in human cognitive neuropsychology and neuroimaging to see if these different tools and approaches could help us to explain more about the questions we’d always been asking as political scientists.

Neuropolitics explores how different insights from psychophysiology and cognitive neuroscience might illuminate the underlying mechanisms of how decisions and compromises are made – or fail to be made – in governing environments that are often highly polarised. That’s not to say that brain scans are necessarily the best way to understand politics. What we are looking at is how different tools, approaches, and ideas can shed a different light or help us gain new insights.

How is neuropolitical research conducted in practice?

As a discipline, if you can call it a discipline, neuropolitics comes from a lot of different directions. Many of the people who work in this field are building on neuroeconomics, using behavioural games, and looking at whether we are more selfish or more pro-social in our behaviour. There’s also a lot of interdisciplinary work coming out of psychology, including experimental psychology focusing on political behaviours. Several research labs also increasingly use big data approaches. Our lab comes from a political science background, and our transdisciplinary team includes cognitive scientists, psychologists, cognitive neuroscientists, and social computational experts.

Our approach to understanding what’s going on in the brain could be described as “funnelling down”: starting with the big picture, and gradually zooming in. Say we’re interested in understanding attitudes towards the European Union. We might start with something very broad, like looking at the way people spontaneously represent themselves in social discourses on social media, and try from that to get some hypotheses about what’s driving that behaviour, at both a social and a cognitive level.

Once we’ve got those hypotheses, we bring them into the lab environment and perhaps set up some behavioural game experiments, where we can manipulate both the games and the context in which they are played. We might also do some biometric testing. We have eye trackers, and we can monitor heart rate and skin conductance to get a sense of the kinds of reactions to stimuli that you might not always be conscious of or want to reveal. One of the things we know from experimental research is that we have a social desirability bias: we don’t always want to show our least favourite sides, at least in public. We also want to please others, so people often try to second-guess things in experiments.

One way to try to control for those kinds of behaviours is to use a variety of methods, including surveys, behavioural observations, and some physiological measures. These measures can show whether the way someone responds to a stimulus – the way their heart rate shifts, or how their skin conductance changes – may or may not be consistent with what they say about how stressed or interested they feel, for example.

Once we have refined our hypotheses, we sometimes turn to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which is more expensive than the other techniques. By funnelling down, we get to a point where we find something relevant that might be happening in the brain and telling us a story. That’s when we invite somebody into a brain scanner and put them in front of a scenario or ask them to do a task. These scans show how different parts of their brain are activated in response to different types of information, actions, or stimuli.

One of the things we know from experimental research is that we have a social desirability bias: we don’t always want to show our least favourite sides, at least in public.

You mentioned that neuropolitics has roots in several different disciplines and approaches. To what extent do you see it as a natural continuation of other trends and directions in social science research, and to what extent is it a revolution, a break with the past?

It is definitely a continuation and an expansion. One thing we have to be aware of is the availability of technology that wasn’t there before, but also that there have always been trends and cycles in social science research. At certain times, there was more of a psychological bent, and then it fell out of favour for a while. More recently, we’ve seen again much more growth in the exploration of the psychological aspects of political behaviour and the study of the emotional aspects of politics, which is a slightly different and additional strand.

With the neoliberal turn of the last few decades, our societies have become more individualistic and atomised. Would you support the claim that individual psychologies have become more important for our political identities than, for example, belonging to a social class?

We are all still fundamentally influenced by social belonging and the groups we identify with. But if we look at it historically, I think the rise of political marketing and the era of spin doctors is very important because playing to emotions and identities, and encouraging polarisation is an extremely powerful political tactic; our identities are very easy to trigger. It’s enough to put one person in the red group and one in the blue group, and very quickly, without any prior knowledge of each other, they’ll have very different opinions about who they really are.

Some experiments show that our perception of the fairness of certain decisions varies depending on whether they’re made by someone who’s part of our in-group or not. When we are asked to distribute money to other people, for example, we tend to be more generous with those who are part of our in-group, and punish those who are part of an out-group. Similarly, we tend to feel that the amount of money offered to us by someone who is part of our in-group is fairer than the amount offered by someone who’s part of an out-group – even if it’s exactly the same amount.

Identities can also influence physical perception. When we categorise someone as one of us or one of our enemies, our judgement of the physical distance between us and them changes. We see them as closer to us if we think we’re threatened. We also know that we judge other people’s morality according to whether we think they are part of our in-group or not. These are not small things. When you start this kind of identitarian conversation, you change people’s objective perceptions of reality.

In a piece of research that we did using fMRI brain imaging, we looked at exclusion through a game where you get a ball thrown at you – it’s called the cyber ball game. We found that people felt excluded by those who had been identified as being part of an out-group, and perceived that they weren’t throwing the ball to them as often, even though that objectively wasn’t the case. Identities affect our sense of exclusion, belonging, and fairness. They affect the way that we see the world.

Some experiments show that our perception of the fairness of certain decisions varies depending on whether they’re made by someone who’s part of our in-group or not.

The more we understand about how we function, the less credible becomes the image of us as individuals who make decisions based solely on deliberation and rational arguments – no matter how educated or informed we are. If biological responses determine our political views, is the space for freedom shrinking?

For a long time, one of the things that made researchers step back a little from psychological research in political behaviour was this question of biological determinism. By having any kind of conversation around genetics, biology, or physiology, were you assuming that behaviours are predetermined? I think we’ve moved beyond that question now. There are strands of research looking at how evolutionary paths might help explain some of our predispositions. Still, there’s a strong understanding of the importance of the context within which genetic predispositions are shaped and reshaped.

Of course, it’s always incumbent on us not to get too lazy and fall into simple assumptions around left-wing and right-wing brains. But there are a lot of caveats to that kind of research, and increasing nuance with fascinating insights emerging – at the end of the day, our brains are not fixed entities. If you see a pattern of brain activity that looks like it can predict conservative or liberal political ideology, it doesn’t mean that individuals were born that way. How our previous decisions shape us might also affect how our brain acts now. We know that we’re products of our environments, our histories, and our experiences. But we are not immutably patterned and fixed into these behaviours.

What does your research teach those who do politics? 

The main lesson is to be really careful about playing to identities. Not all identity divisions are inevitable. The European project is a great example. Coming out of World War II, it was really hard to get nation states to come together, but they managed to almost take national identity out of the conversation and focus on practical things – building back together through the European Coal and Steel Community, and through economic cooperation. There’s an important lesson there, which is supported by neuropolitical research: if you avoid immediately triggering the us-versus-them opposition, you don’t just change behaviours; you change the way we process information in the brain.

What we’ve found in our research is that we don’t just rationalise things post hoc according to our identity. On the contrary, we can see in real time that the area of the brain associated with social learning is activated differently depending on whether we are working with someone we see as part of our own group or another group. These are not things to be played with lightly.

But in our era of deep political divisions and hyper-polarisation, there seems to be an incentive to play on identities. Could neuropolitical research become another tool for those who thrive on division?

I think we’ve got to be careful with the idea that there’s more political polarisation today than at any time in history. We’ve been through world wars. There’s a tendency to characterise the world as hyperpolarised. But I think in many contexts we could question that assumption.

We shouldn’t exaggerate the potential of neuropolitics either, either as a silver bullet to completely resolve the world’s democratic backsliding, or as an evil tool in the hands of opportunistic political actors. Emotions have always been a tool. Now we’re beginning to understand better why and with which groups it might be effective. If we recognise that identity and groupthink are important, we can better understand why it doesn’t work to present policy proposals in a depoliticised way, as if they were the only rational option. To be effective, policies need to be framed in a way that appeals to a social group that believes in something different. This sense of identity is in itself a mobiliser.

If we recognise that identity and groupthink are important, we can better understand why it doesn’t work to present policy proposals in a depoliticised way.

Neuropolitics also helps us understand why some of the efforts made so far to counter polarisation haven’t worked the way we hoped. For example, a lot of effort has been put into countering misinformation and disinformation through tools like fact-checking, and we’ve often found that these approaches have backlash effects. Brain scans and other techniques reveal why that is the case by monitoring what is happening in the moment. They tell us we may need a different approach to inoculate against that backlash.

One of the most successful narratives of the far right today is that “wokeness” inhibits us and drives us too far away from our “true” nature, which they see as that of individuals and groups competing with each other for success and resources. Does neuropolitical research support that view?

In our research, we’re mostly looking at higher cognitive processes, so I wouldn’t support the idea that our “primitive brain” is what really drives us. We are a complex mélange of drivers and inhibitors.

There’s also a broader argument that being social is an incredibly rational thing to do. It gives us a lot of protection. Some experts argue that our brain is hard-wired for sociality. Others say that sociality comes later, when, as children, we need the social group around us – our primary caregivers – to regulate our bodies. But whether we are hard-wired for sociality or develop that dimension through our need for homeostasis and regulation as human beings, it’s very clear that being social is rational. So I would tend not to pit the two perspectives against each other. Even if you think that sociality is something we learn, learning to be social is, in many ways, learning to be us.

How is the AI revolution changing brain research?

If I were giving a lecture, I’d start by saying that what we understand about the brain is minuscule. We constantly adapt and shift the models of understanding and interpreting the images and measures. The pace of change and the ability to keep up with that change are probably going to be the biggest challenges, but there will also be some really exciting innovations happening.

There’s this saying that it takes a village to raise a child, but to bring forward this kind of transdisciplinary research, it is more accurate to say that it takes an international organisation. You need social computational experts, brain imaging experts, psychologists, and political scientists, and all of them are coming with different disciplinary understandings, methods, and approaches. At the beginning, they’re all speaking different languages, and that requires the development of new shared languages, worldviews, and vernaculars. This is probably the biggest contribution of neuropolitics. And I think that’s what will happen again and again, as the technology evolves. It is almost impossible to predict what will happen even two years from now.

Is the world of politics paying attention to these developments, or is neuropolitics still very much confined to academia?

Neuropolitics is reaching out of the lab in small ways. People who are making policies and communicating politics are interested in understanding more about how different groups are reached, how messages resonate with different publics, and how physiological responses to information might change how people act or behave in response to a message.

I think there are a lot of productive ways in which this research can help communicate policies in a way that people hear them better. If you are a policymaker, what’s often most concerning is whether a message gets heard at all. After all the work you have done, people won’t even listen to you in an open way if you accidentally trigger some kind of negative association when they hear or read your message.

The good news is that identities are much more malleable than we might realise. You can build shared identities around a policy outcome and a policy community. This measured approach to politics doesn’t necessarily get the headlines, but over the long term, it can be much more effective. If you need to implement a certain policy, you’ll need people and bureaucracies to buy into it. Instead of firing people up to view the world through their polarised lens, you might want to work on finding common ground and shared identities – remembering that we all have multiple identities and often positive outcomes come from a confluence of very disparate interests.