Can brain activity reveal your political party during grocery store?

A new study reveals that your brain reacts to food purchase decisions can be used to determine your political affiliation with an accuracy of almost 80%.

Researchers from Iowa State University, the University of Kansas Medical Center, Oklahoma State University and the University of Exeter in England have used brain imaging techniques to examine adults buying eggs and milk at various prices and products in different ways.

Interestingly, purchases did not differ considerably by the political party of adults. What differs through political affiliation are the fields of the brain that were active during purchases. The study is published in the journal Politics and life sciences.

“Simplifying this a little, you cannot say if someone is a democrat or a republican when you see them buying eggs outdoors, but if you were to examine their brain activity, you would see that they would use different parts of their brain in this decision. Brain activity predicts the party, not buying,” said John Crospi, economics teacher at Iowa State and one of the researchers on the study.

The co-author Darren Schreiber added: “We know in twin studies that around 50% of your political ideology is biologically hereditary and that your parents’ data allows us to deduce your political party with a precision of 69%. So it is quite surprising that the brain signal while you buy eggs and milk allows us to properly classify your political party.”

While the participants made their decisions, an irmf scanner recorded an activity in several areas of the brain, including the Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex. While Crespi has warned against the excessive simplification of what the different regions of the brain are responsible, it noted that “the Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex is associated with many of what we could call economic decision -making – where you assess an object on another not necessarily in the sense of a dollar, but in the way you intrinsically evaluate choices.”

What the researchers have noticed is that if the Democrats and self -deprecated Republicans can often make the same purchasing decisions, they could determine the political affiliation of the participants at a high level of precision according to their brain activity while they made the decision.

“We can discern your probability of being in one or another, how these regions of the brain react to what you choose even if the choices end up being exactly the same as someone in another party,” said Crespi. “I think that is what is intriguing – we cannot say if you are a democrat of the eggs that you buy, but by the parts of the brain you use to buy the eggs.”

The fact that it was a real purchasing decision was also important – prevailing research show that study participants sometimes make decisions contrary to their real decisions when they were asked to make purely hypothetical decisions.

“We have given $ 50 to the subjects, but we told them that one of the products they selected would be given to them at the end of the study and that its price would be deducted from their $ 50,” said Crespi. “So they returned home with a milk jug or an egg card and all the money they had left after the purchase.”

The researchers chose to use milk and eggs in the study because they wanted common grocery articles which were indistinguishable by the brand, because the brand image can make purchasing decisions more personal and modifies our way of thinking about them. “We also wanted products that have made changes to their production practices, things that we could add to the label that could influence the purchase, and not just price changes – free range eggs, for example,” said Crespi.

The recent politicization of egg prices in the United States has not influenced the results of the study, said Crespi. “We actually studied 10 years ago. We published something like six or seven articles, but we are only just this document. Because the data was so expensive to collect and because there is so much information that is recorded in a brain analysis, we try to do as much with the data as possible.”

The results of this study said Crespi, would be more than probably applicable to other purchasing decisions. “I would be surprised to note that the results do not resist other products of products-the parts of your brain which are active when buying an egg card are active when other decisions are made,” he said.

Crespi also said that he thought that their study adds to a small but growing literature in political science and economics on brain activity and political ideology. “The work of my co-author Darren Schreiber was among the first in this area showing that the differences seem to be there. There are so few studies on politics and purchasing decisions that also look at the brain activity that I am a little excited to say that it is really a first.

“There are a few other studies that are in the same spirit, and our predictions are resisting in relation to their own, although they did not look at food choices like us.