Kevin Ochsner, a professor of psychology, uses brain scanning fMRI technology to investigate questions that social psychologists have traditionally studied using behavioral methods—lab studies and field studies that measure behavior and experience.

In two papers published this fall, Ochsner and his collaborators examined the neural mechanisms underlying political partisanship, and how emotional responses to figures in the #MeToo movement evolved over time, as demonstrated through public social media posts about those figures.

The first paperon partisanship, was published in Cerebral Cortexand the second paperon the #MeToo movement, is available as a preprint on the PsyArXiv server.

Columbia News spoke with Ochsner about what the findings mean, and what broader questions in psychology he hopes they can help unfurl.

What does your recent paper on partisanship explore?

This paper was led by a number of collaborators, including a former graduate student of mine, Nir Jacoby, currently a post-doctoral fellow at Dartmouth, and by Emile Bruneau, who was a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania who tragically passed away from cancer. in 2020.

The paper sought to address the tribal nature of politics—the idea that people are fierce partisans of one political tribe (ie, political party) or another. We wanted to use brain imaging to shed light on the neural mechanisms that underlie that partisanship, and how they shape the way we understand political discourse.

The background to this is that there is existing research—some of which was done by my collaborators on this paper—that distinguishes two types of “partisan lenses” through which people view politics: policy-based and identity-based.

Policy-based partisanship is when someone affiliates with a political party because of their beliefs about particular issues, like abortion. Identity-based partisanship is when party affiliation reflects an emotional attachment to a group.

To shed light on the mechanisms that underlie each type of partisanship, and how they shape the ways we understand political discourse, we showed study participants videos of people talking about either policy-based or identity-based partisan issues, while measuring their brain activity in response.

What we found, to simplify a bit, is that there’s no single set of regions that underlies these two kinds of partisanship—different, albeit related, neural mechanisms for emotion and social cognition are being activated in response to each form of partisanship.

One important takeaway is that once we understand these neural mechanisms, we may be able to develop interventions to combat some of the most harmful effects of identity-based partisanship. These interventions could be tailored to influence the operation of the relevant neural systems, which could improve their effectiveness.

Another recent paper you worked on looked at the #MeToo movement. What were you trying to find out?

This paper was led by my graduate student Benjamin Silver, whose interests, broadly, are in how our beliefs and feelings about other people change over time.

This paper focused on men who were accused of abuse during the #MeToo movement. We scraped Tweets about these men (which the platform no longer allows you to do) to see how discussions about them changed after accusations of them came to light. We analyzed how the moral language people used to talk about these figures changed over time.

I think one of the most interesting findings was that how liked the person was before their accusation, as well as the severity of the accusations themselves, jointly influenced the nature of the discourse about them afterwards.

If the figure was highly liked and the allegations were more severe then more immoral language was used to talk about them. By contrast, if the allegations were less severe, then the discourse about well-liked figures was more mild.

We interpreted this pattern as reflecting the sense of being betrayed if a well-liked figure was thought to have committed a serious transgression, as opposed to being able to forgive less serious allegations. That’s one of a number of interesting findings.

How would you connect these two papers? What is the broader question they’re both getting at?

I think of my lab as studying the primary colors of our socio-emotional lives. The monitors we’re looking at as we speak on this Zoom call have a seemingly infinite and dynamically changing array of images, but they’re actually produced by the way in which red, green, and blue pixels are illuminated.

In like fashion, we think of the complexities of our socio-emotional lives as being produced by three primary abilities—our capacities for emotion, to perceive and understand other people, and to exert self-control. Work in my lab tends to focus on behaviors and experiences that depend on at least two of these primary abilities working in combination.

What unites these two papers is that they both focus on examples from everyday life where our emotions influence the way we perceive other people and their actions. In one paper, we saw related, but distinct, brain systems for emotion and understanding other minds involved in two kinds of political partisanship. In the other paper, we charted the rise and fall of moral emotions shaping public discourse about well-known individuals.

More broadly, this “three primary colors” approach is reflected in the ways my lab looks at other topics—like how self-control combines with emotion and person perception as individuals regulate their own emotions to cope with, for example, stress and trauma, and how we regulate each other’s emotions, both those of our friends and loved ones, and in broader groups.

What do you like to do in your free time?

My son and I are huge fans of soccer, and of the English Premier League in particular. We make pilgrimages downtown because the team we support has a big fanbase at a pub down there where a lot of British expats in New York hang out. Sometimes it feels like the love fans have for a particular Premiere League team involves a kind of sports partisanship that goes beyond what sports fans in the US have and feels more like US politics. The tribal nature of team loyalty is profound.

What team do you root for?

Manchester City, because we love the coach and some of the players.

Are you from Manchester?

I’m from the Chicago area.

Is there a lesson there about partisanship in general?

There’s a lot of psychological research that shows that partisanship is easy to create: All you have to do is give people something as random as a blue sticker to wear, and within minutes they start showing favoritism to blue sticker wearers over red sticker wearers. There seems to be something built into us about picking sides, and quickly having allegiance to our in-group and animosity toward any out-group.

Our recent brain imaging suggests, however, that the ready and stark nature of partisan behaviors we see in life may belie the complexity of the underlying brain mechanisms. And understanding that complexity will hopefully help us address cases where partisanship becomes problematic.