By Marcelina Horrillo Husillos, Journalist and Correspondent at The World Financial Review
A new study published in the journal Neuroscience has found that attitudes on both the political left and right are linked to specific structural differences in the brain.
Right-wing adults have less gray matter volume in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, a region involved in social reasoning, and those who endorsed more extreme forms of left-wing authoritarianism showed reduced cortical thickness in the right anterior insula, a brain area tied to empathy and emotion regulation.
Another international study published in the Journal of Personality has found that people across the world are more likely to support authoritarian forms of government when they feel threatened by world dangers such as crime, poverty, or political instability. This pattern was observed across 59 countries, making it the largest cross-cultural test of its kind to date. The results also show that this relationship tends to be more pronounced among people who identify as politically right-leaning.
In today’s world, our politics are often driven by anger and one-sided, impulsive decisions. According to neuroscientists, authoritarian attitudes are linked to altered brain anatomy, but not exclusively.
What are the causes and consequences of impulsivity, dogmatism, and seeking conflict in today’s politics?
What is Authoritarianism
Authoritarianism, in psychological research, refers to a preference for strong leadership, strict social order, and obedience to authority, often at the expense of democratic principles like civil liberties and pluralism. The concept was originally developed in the aftermath of World War II to understand how ordinary people could come to support totalitarian regimes.
Over the decades, numerous theories have suggested that feelings of threat or insecurity—whether due to economic hardship, violence, or political turmoil —may trigger a psychological shift toward favoring more authoritarian governance. However, most previous research has been based on relatively small studies conducted in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies, raising concerns about whether the findings could be generalized to the rest of the world.
To address these gaps, author Lucian (Luke) Gideon Conway III, a professor at Grove City College and author of Liberal Bullies: What Psychology Teaches Us About the Left’s Authoritarian Problem – And How to Fix It, analyzed data from the World Values Survey, a long-running global research project that collects information on political beliefs, cultural values, and social attitudes from representative samples in dozens of countries. He selected over 20 survey items related to different kinds of realistic threats, including personal and family-level threats like food insecurity and lack of access to medicine, neighborhood-level dangers like crime and police intrusion, political threats like voter intimidation or media bias, and general worries about war, terrorism, or unemployment. These items were combined into a cumulative threat index.
The final sample included 84,677 people from 59 countries across six continents, with both WEIRD and non-WEIRD nations represented. Statistical models were used to assess whether perceived threat predicted support for authoritarian government while controlling for variables such as age, gender, education, income, and political ideology.
The results showed a consistent and robust association between threat levels and authoritarian attitudes. Individuals who reported greater personal, neighborhood, or political threats—or who simply expressed more general worry about threats—were more likely to support authoritarian forms of governance. This held true even after accounting for people’s political ideology or how extreme their views were. In other words, feeling threatened was linked to stronger support for authoritarian leadership regardless of whether someone identified as politically left or right.
“Across the world, people who report feeling threatened by things such as crime and poverty are more prone to want authoritarian leaders,” Conway told PsyPost. “That is true whether you are liberal or conservative, and it is true whether you live in a Western country (such as the United States or Western Europe) or a non-Western country. However, the authoritarianism-threat relationship is stronger for conservatives (versus liberals) and in Western (versus non-Western) countries.”
The findings support a “soft asymmetry” view by showing that realistic threats predict authoritarian attitudes across the political spectrum, but the effect is stronger among right-leaning individuals. This suggests that while both liberals and conservatives can become more authoritarian under threat, conservatives are more consistently responsive to such conditions.
The study adds to a growing body of evidence that supports the theory that human psychology evolved to prioritize strong leadership during times of threat. A recent paper published in Evolution and Human Behavior also found that people in 25 countries were more likely to prefer dominant-looking leaders when they were asked to imagine a scenario involving war or international conflict. In that study, participants viewed faces manipulated to appear more or less dominant and consistently chose the more dominant face when under threat. The preference for dominance was found to be consistent across many countries, echoing the current study’s finding that perceived threat prompts people to favor authoritarian traits in leaders.
Psychological Roots
Published in the journal Neuroscience, new research out of Spain’s University of Zaragoza found, upon scanning the brains of 100 young adults, that those who hold authoritarian beliefs had major differences in brain areas associated with social reasoning and emotional regulation from subjects whose politics hewed more to the center.
Young adults who scored higher on right-wing authoritarianism had less gray matter volume in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, a region involved in social reasoning. Meanwhile, those who endorsed more extreme forms of left-wing authoritarianism showed reduced cortical thickness in the right anterior insula, a brain area tied to empathy and emotion regulation.
To investigate these questions, the researchers recruited 100 young adults in Spain, mostly university students between the ages of 18 and 30. Each participant completed a series of psychological questionnaires that measured political orientation, authoritarian beliefs, impulsivity, anxiety, and emotional regulation.
Importantly, the researchers used updated scales that assess both traditional right-wing authoritarianism and a recently developed measure of left-wing authoritarianism, which includes dimensions like anti-hierarchical aggression and top-down censorship.
Behaviorally, the results supported previous findings that people with authoritarian attitudes, regardless of political orientation, tend to act impulsively in emotionally charged situations. Both left-wing and right-wing authoritarians scored higher on “negative urgency,” a trait linked to impulsive actions under distress. However, left-wing authoritarianism—especially the tendency toward aggressive anti-establishment views—was also linked to higher levels of trait anxiety.
“Both left-wing and right-wing authoritarians act impulsively in emotionally negative situations, while the former tend to be more anxious,” Adrián-Ventura stated.
To further validate their findings, the researchers examined whether these brain differences were also associated with related political ideologies. The gray matter reductions in the prefrontal cortex correlated with higher scores on social dominance orientation, a belief system often linked to right-wing authoritarianism. Likewise, the thinning in the anterior insula was related to endorsement of radical feminist views, which share ideological ground with the anti-authority stance of left-wing authoritarianism.
The researchers emphasized that authoritarian beliefs are not solely determined by brain anatomy. Instead, the structural differences may reflect long-standing cognitive and emotional patterns that interact with social and cultural influences. For example, people with a tendency to experience anxiety or act rashly under stress may be more drawn to authoritarian ideologies when they perceive the world as threatening or unstable.
Conclusion
Over the past two decades, citizens’ political rights and civil liberties have declined globally. Psychological science can play an instrumental role in both explaining and combating the authoritarian impulses that underlie these attacks on personal autonomy.
The psychological processes and situational factors that foster authoritarianism, as well as the societal consequences of its apparent resurgence within the general population are worth to be analysed in depth.
The perception of threads, the feeling of fear to the unknown, and viewing the world as a dangerous, but not necessarily competitive, place plants the psychological seeds of authoritarianism.
However, the research suggests that there are also evolutionary, genetic, personality and developmental antecedents to authoritarianism, and explain how contextual threats to safety and security activate authoritarian predispositions.
After seeing the harmful consequences of authoritarianism, dogmatism, politics of rage, and politics of impulsivity for the societal groups; we come to the conclusion that we need to observe how fear (this based on a real thread or not) acts in the mechanisms of our brain, and in our responsive attitude by consequence.
Politics largely knowledgeable of the human psychology and structured around marketing strategy, target human emotions, and in particular human emotions not handled effectively (such as anger, hatred, frustration, etc.), often with a goal of manipulating people towards hidden goals of dominance and control.
Expanding the ideological boundaries of authoritarianism and encourage future research to investigate both right-wing and left-wing variants of authoritarianism is key to understand how these mechanisms work in our brain and in our social context.
We all hold social responsibility to address these issues, to educate ourselves and the people around us; so, the audiences become selective and well able to filter manipulative content targeting people’s emotions.
