Differential brain activations between Democrats and Republicans when considering food purchases
Date
2025-03-28
Authors
Bruce, Amanda S.
Lagoudakis, Angelos
Lusk, Jayson L.
Schreiber, Darren M.
Wu, Qianrong
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Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Association for Politics and the Life Sciences
Abstract
We measured brain activity using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) paradigm and conducted a whole-brain analysis while healthy adult Democrats and Republicans made non-hypothetical food choices. While the food purchase decisions were not significantly different, we found that brain activation during decision-making differs according to the participant’s party affiliation. Models of partisanship based on left insula, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, precuneus, superior frontal gyrus, or premotor/supplementary motor area activations achieve better than expected accuracy. Understanding the differential function of neural systems that lead to indistinguishable choices may provide leverage in explaining the broader mechanisms of partisanship.
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This article is published as Bruce AS, Crespi JM, Hayes DJ, et al. Differential brain activations between Democrats and Republicans when considering food purchases. Politics and the Life Sciences. Published online 2025:1-17. doi:10.1017/pls.2025.2.
Rights Statement
© The Author(s), 2025. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
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Funding
The present study was funded by a grant from the United States Department of Agriculture (Grant No. 2011–67023-30047, http://www.usda.gov/). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.