Most of us have certain values that are dear to us, whilst there are other values that we don't hold quite so dear, they are more pliable by nature.  New neural research has revealed that the values we do not budge on involve a completely different part of the brain to when we're thinking of values that aren't so important.

For instance religious beliefs are generally pretty sacred, and the research found that these thoughts required a distinct cognitive process.  They tend to utilise a part of the brain traditionally associated with rule based thought processes that fall into the right or wrong camp.  This compares with other thought processes that fall into cost/benefit style thinking.

The researchers fitted people up to fMRI scanners and asked to choose between 62 pairs of statements, including things such as 'you support gay marriage' to the more mundane 'I am a tea drinker'.  The participants were then later offered money for each statement via an auction that saw offers of up to $100 per statement.  If they wished to opt out of the auction for a particular issue they could.

“We used the auction as a measure of integrity for specific statements,” the researchers explains. “If a person refused to take money to change a statement, then we considered that value to be personally sacred to them. But if they took money, then we considered that they had low integrity for that statement and that it wasn’t sacred.”

The fMRI data revealed a strong correlation between sacred values and activation of the neural systems associated with evaluating rights and wrongs (the left temporoparietal junction) and semantic rule retrieval (the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex), but not with systems associated with reward.

So why is this important?

If you think about how most public policy is designed, it tends to involve incentives and disincentives.  This research suggests that this thinking will not work when it comes to issues people find particularly sacred.  These values are processed in completely different areas of the brain than are used for processing rewards and punishments.

What is also interesting is that participants that were active members of clubs like a local football team or a church group had much stronger brain activity in the region linked with holding sacred values.  So it seems the two are linked, and being part of a team is strongly associated with holding strong views.

“Organized groups may instill values more strongly through the use of rules and social norms,” the researchers said.

So this also has implications for advertisers and the like who may try and get us to change our preferences by offering financial incentives or special offers.  The lesson is that if someone has very strong allegiance to something you may as well not bother.  So if you're trying to get people to change their toilet paper you may have a chance, but if you're trying to get them changing football team you'll be out of luck.