Politically extreme individuals exhibit similar neural processing despite ideological differences

People often assume that liberals and conservatives think about politics in different ways. The authors argue, however, that ideological extremity is best understood as an emotional style of political thinking rather than a difference in factual reasoning. The evidence for this conclusion comes from a recent fMRI study in which de Bruin and FeldmanHall (2025) scanned US participants as they watched real political videos: people with more extreme views — on either the left or the right — showed stronger activity in emotion-linked brain areas such as the amygdala and anterior insula, and showed more similar brain activity to other extreme political supporters regardless of which side those supporters were on. These findings support the conclusion because activity in the amygdala and anterior insula is known to track how strongly a person reacts to a stimulus, rather than the specific content of their beliefs, so a shared neural response across opposing sides points to a shared emotional style rather than to shared ideas. This warranting principle is itself supported by a wider body of work in affective neuroscience on the role of these regions in emotional intensity. The argument therefore suggests that efforts to reduce polarisation should focus on emotions, not just on giving people more information. These conclusions, however, come with clear limits: the study is correlational, the sample includes only US participants, and ideology was self-reported. So the findings may not apply to multiparty systems or to non-electoral forms of extremism.