NEW YORK (CNN) — A new study holds clues as to why we get so passionate about politics.
When your political views are challenged, the brain becomes active in regions associated with personal identity, threat response and emotions, according to the study.
"We think it's because political beliefs are important to our identity, to our sense of who we are. They are part of our social selves as well and can define who we spend time with and how they relate to us," said Jonas Kaplan, assistant research professor of psychology at the University of Southern California's Brain and Creativity Institute, who was lead author of the study.
"When the brain considers something to be part of itself, whether it's a body part or a belief, then it protects it in the same way," he said.
Now, the researchers hope that their findings could shed light on how to talk politics without provoking a brawl.
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Tips for talking politics
The new study is in line with prior research that also has showed how challenges to political beliefs are associated with emotional responses from the brain, said Drew Westen, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at Emory University in Atlanta and author of "The Political Brain." He was not involved in the new study.
In order to effectively challenge someone's political views without triggering an emotional response, Westen said, your counterargument should do two things: solve the problem at the root of the political belief and address the values attached to the belief.
"The last thing to do is to try to argue someone out of a belief when they're strongly committed to it emotionally, because what makes it so strong is the emotion attached to it, not the facts or arguments that support it," Westen said.
In addition, "you solve the problem for them," he said. "You are addressing what their problem is, and when you do that, you don't have to fight with them about what the facts are, because you're going to change them."
Consider abortion, a hot topic that was included in the new study. Westen used the example of someone who is for abortion rights talking to someone with anti-abortion views to explain how to identify, address and empathize with someone's values to challenge beliefs.
The key is to identify the other person's values, even if they differ from your own.
"Words like 'reproductive health' sound like you're discounting their moral concerns and seeing this as just a medical issue. You don't want to come from a medical perspective," he said. "If you instead say, 'You know, I just don't like the idea of the government telling a woman or a couple when they should or shouldn't start their family.' ... Now you're activating two completely different neural networks than you've activated before: one about government interference in our private lives and the other about families."
He added, "it also makes this a man's issue and not just a woman's issue, so men feel, correctly, like they have skin in the game, too."
If you want to end a conversation before it gets heated, simply agree to disagree, Daniel Post Senning, an etiquette expert from the Emily Post Institute, said in November.
"You are also not obligated to have these conversations," Senning said. "If you are willing to cede the last word or acknowledge that your opinions may differ, it's very hard to argue with that."
Now that neuroscientists better understand how the brain responds emotionally to political beliefs, it's equally important to study what happens in the brain when you might be persuaded to change your beliefs, Kaplan said.
"While it makes sense to defend the beliefs that are important to us, it's also crucial that we are able to change them when it's appropriate to do so," he said.
