Understanding Divergent Interpretations of Political Information
The current atmosphere of politically polarized media has strengthened individuals’ political bias in how they interpret news and other information. Using a combination of methods from neuroscience, linguistics, and computer science, this collaboration will refine existing approaches for measuring political bias. fMRI studies will measure the neural responses of conservatives and liberals while watching political debates, while natural language processing methods will build predictive models of the types of content that increase these divergent brain responses. The results will help create interventions that combat messaging designed to further inflame polarization, facilitating healthier political discourse.
Principal Investigators: Yuan Chang Leong (Assistant Professor, Psychology) and Daniel Grzenda (PhD Student, Computer Science)
[Image Credit: National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, via Flickr]