KUALA LUMPUR (June 4): A new study has revealed that brain scans can predict which political party someone supports.

A team from The Ohio State University (OSU) has reported that certain “signatures” in the brain accurately line up with how someone leans politically — as either conservatives or liberals.

The study is the largest to date to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of the brain to study political ideology.

In a statement on June 2, OSU said brain scans of people taken while they performed various tasks — and even did nothing — accurately predicted whether they were politically conservative or liberal, according to the largest study of its kind.

Researchers found that the “signatures” in the brain revealed by the scans were as accurate at predicting political ideology as the strongest predictor generally used in political science research, which is the ideology of a person’s parents.

Study co-author Skyler Cranmer, the Phillips and Henry Professor of Political Science at OSU, said the results suggest that the biological and neurological roots of political behaviour run much deeper than previously thought.

OSU said researchers also looked at functional connectivity within the brain and its connection to a person’s political leaning.

Functional connectivity refers to how different regions of the brain display similar patterns of activity when someone performs certain tasks.

The report said that simply put, these regions all communicate and work together when focusing on a task.

“Your brain is talking politics — even when you’re not!” said OSU.

The university said study authors used state-of-the-art artificial intelligence programmes and other resources at the Ohio Supercomputer Center to analyse the brain scans.

They found strong connections between those scans and how participants answered questions gauging their political ideology on a six-point scale — going from “very liberal” to “very conservative”.

OSU said the eight tasks the 174 participants completed during this test did not focus on politics.

It said even so, their answers gave researchers an indication of how they lean politically and matched up with differences in the MRI results.

Study co-author Seo Eun Yang, a former doctoral student at OSU said none of the eight tasks was designed to elicit partisan responses.

“But we found the scans from all eight tasks were related to whether they identified as liberals or conservatives,” she said.

She said that moreover, even when the participants just sat quietly and did not think about anything, the MRI scans reveal differences in how the brains of conservatives and liberals look.