Neural correlates of belief change in political and non-political domains among left-wing individuals confronted with counterarguments

This preregistered study investigates the neural mechanisms underlying resistance to belief change among individuals with strong left-wing orientations, examining both political and non-political domains. Building on previous work, we aimed to assess whether the neural signatures of belief resistance are culturally universal by replicating the study in a non-American context. Forty-three participants who held firmly established left-wing views were presented with counterarguments targeting their political and non-political beliefs while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Consistent with the original study, participants exhibited robust resistance to changing their political beliefs, although demonstrating greater openness to revising non-political ones. Challenges to political beliefs elicited heightened activation within the Default Mode Network (DMN), especially in regions associated with self-referential processing and introspection—highlighting the identity-protective function of such beliefs. Moreover, greater resistance to belief change was linked to increased activation in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) and reduced activity in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), a region implicated in belief updating. In contrast to the original findings, we observed no correlation between belief change and (lower) activation in emotion-related regions such as the insula and amygdala. Taken together, these results suggest that the process of belief change—across both political and non-political domains—is deeply rooted in neural systems responsible for maintaining self-identity.