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Brains won't learn from rivals
The Learning Task
A 2021 study in The Journal of Neuroscience scanned the brains of 34 people while they learned a task. First they watched a video of someone else trying it, with some attempts working and some failing. Then they tried it themselves.
The Rival Effect
When viewers took the person on screen to be a member of a rival out group, in this case the opposing party among Democrats and Republicans, they did not pick up anything from that person's mistake or from their successful method. Learning from the other side simply did not happen, even though the lesson would have helped them.
The Theory Behind It
The study counts as evidence for social identity theory, which holds that once people sort others into in groups and out groups, everyone on the far side gets seen through a distorted lens.
How does watching someone count as learning?
Observational learning is how people pick up skills without paying the cost of trial and error themselves. Imaging studies of it, including a 2010 study in PNAS led by Christopher Burke, found that the brain tracks a watched person's outcomes with prediction-error signals like those it uses for its own outcomes. A failure on screen gets flagged as surprising information, and that signal is what teaches. These signals showed up in the striatum and in prefrontal cortex.
Why use political parties as the divide?
In the United States, party membership has become one of the strongest social identities. Shanto Iyengar and Sean Westwood reported in a 2015 American Journal of Political Science study that, in their experiments, party affiliation shaped choices such as scholarship awards more strongly than race did. A party label is also easy to assign and measure, since participants can be told a person's party in a single line of profile information.
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