Neuropolitics: Social Dominance Orietation is associated with being as selfish jerk and egalitarian orientation is associated with being an bleeding heart, tax-and-spend deficit-increaser. Brain scan included.

A report from the spectacular issue of New York Academy of Sciences, Values and Empathy across Social Barriers: A Neurocognitive Approach demonstrates that compassion is negatively correlated with being power hungry, and positively correlated with being a touchy-feely tax and spend liberal. (OK, that sentence was for drama.)

Basically, the animal kingdom, red in tooth and claw, is wired for hierarchies, battle to the death, Darwinian style.  Social dominance orientation is found throughout the animal kingdom, including humans in Orange County, as opposed to most San Francisco districts, where the animal kingdom tends toward a more egalitarian point of view (at least when times are good and they have plenty of RE equity).  Fox vs. HuffPo, conservative vs. liberal, all sorts of studies have been done as to brain differences. ( See here, here, and here, for example).

Here’s the brain scan.  Images of people in pain vs. people in neutral situations were shown. Those with a social dominance orientation displayed less “empathy” than those with an egalitarian orientation, as demonstrated by activation of two brain areas, the L insula, and the ACC :

Here’s the paper:

Joan Y. Chiao , Vani A. Mathur, Tokiko Harada, and Trixie Lipke, “Neural Basis of Preference for Human Social Hierarchy versus Egalitarianism,” Values, Empathy, and Fairness across Social Barriers: Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1167: 174–181 (2009) doi: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.04508.x

Tags: anterior cingulate cortex, anterior insula, egalitarianism, emotion, empathy, fmri, justice, political attitudes, social dominance orientation, social hierarchy