Brain scans may predict political ideology

This study maybe flawed! I am skeptical. The researchers combined the brain scans with socio-economic indicators. I did not have time to read the whole research paper.

However, the brain is flexible (neuroplasticity). Political ideologies may change over a life span.

"... [researchers] recruited 174 participants and carried out fMRI scans while the participants were carrying out various tasks. ...
When the brain scans were coupled with demographic and other indicators (such as age, gender, and education), the model was better than any other single indicator at predicting ideology. In fact, even when people weren’t doing anything and were just sitting idly, the brain signatures showed a relationship to political ideology.
In particular, activations of specific regions of the brain (the amygdala, inferior frontal gyrus and the hippocampus) were most strongly associated with political affiliation. ..."

From the abstract:

"Emerging research has begun investigating the neural underpinnings of the biological and psychological differences that drive political ideology, attitudes, and actions. Here we explore the neurological roots of politics through conducting a large sample, whole-brain analysis of functional connectivity (FC) across common fMRI tasks. Using convolutional neural networks, we develop predictive models of ideology using FC from fMRI scans for nine standard task-based settings in a novel cohort of healthy adults (n = 174, age range: 18-40, mean = 21.43) from the Ohio State University Wellbeing Project. Our analyses suggest that liberals and conservatives have noticeable and discriminative differences in functional connectivity that can be identified with high accuracy using contemporary artificial intelligence methods and that such analyses complement contemporary models relying on socio-economic and survey-based responses. Functional connectivity signatures from retrieval, empathy, and monetary reward tasks are identified as important and powerful predictors of conservatism, and activations of the amygdala, inferior frontal gyrus, and hippocampus are most strongly associated with political affiliation. Although the direction of causality is unclear, this study suggests that the biological and neurological roots of political behavior run much deeper than previously thought."

Turns out, brain scans are remarkably good at predicting political ideology

Functional Connectivity Signatures of Political Ideology (open access)