Neuroscientist: Why Trumpists Will Never Abandon Trump
–Bobby Azarian, cognitive neuroscientist and blogger for Psychology Today, joins David to discuss how Donald trump continues to hold on to his base’s support
reason that this is relates to theunwavering support so this effect is isamplified in conservatives becauseconservatives have this hypersensitivity
to threat generally speaking so by thatI mean they tend to focus on threat moreand they tend to have this exaggeratedfear response to threatening messages sowe know this from a number of differentstudies for example one study tooksir motives and liberals and had themsit in front of a computer screen wherethey showed a bunch of different imagessome of the images were threateningsomewhere neutrals some are positive andthey track their eye movements and whatthey found is that conservatives fixatedon the threatening images longer andthey oriented toward the threateningimages more quickly then liberals soyeah we call that being hyper-vigilantfor threat and a couple other studiesshowed that conservatives tend to have alarger amygdala and a more reactiveamygdala in response to threat yes ohthe amygdala is a brain structure thatis involved in processing threat andit’s also associated with the fearresponseso when Donald Trump is saying thesescary messages their brains are engagedeven more strongly his messages are moresalient because they’re in a way tunedinto threat and I’m not really trying topick on conservatives here that’s whatthe studies show also you know someonecould interpret that differently and youcould see it as Republicans orconservatives might also be betterequipped to respond to a threat in thecase that you know something does happenbecause they’re they’re hyper vigilantabsolutely fascinating stuff we’ve beenspeaking with cognitive neuroscientistBobby Azarian who also blogs forPsychology Today you can follow him ontwitter at bobby Azarian and check out