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Sharing data is a scientific imperative that accelerates scientific discoveries, reinforces open science inquiry, and allows for efficient use of public investment and research resources. Considering these benefits, data sharing has been widely promoted in diverse fields and neuroscience has been no exception to this movement. For all its promise, however, the sharing of human neuroimaging data raises critical ethical and legal issues, such as data privacy. Recently, the heightened risks to data privacy posed by the rapid advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques have made data sharing more challenging; the regulatory landscape around data sharing has also been evolving rapidly. Here we present an in-depth ethical and regulatory analysis that examines how neuroimaging data are currently shared against the backdrop of the relevant regulations and policies in the United States and how advanced software tools and algorithms might undermine subjects' privacy in neuroimaging data sharing. The implications of these novel technological threats to privacy in neuroimaging data sharing practices and policies will also be discussed. We then conclude with a proposal for a legal prohibition against malicious use of neuroscience data as a regulatory mechanism to address privacy risks associated with the data while maximizing the benefits of data sharing and open science practice in the field of neuroscience., (© 2022 The Authors. Human Brain Mapping published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.)

Although human existence is enveloped by ideologies, remarkably little is understood about the relationships between ideological attitudes and psychological traits. Even less is known about how cognitive dispositions-individual differences in how information is perceived and processed- sculpt individuals' ideological worldviews, proclivities for extremist beliefs and resistance (or receptivity) to evidence. Using an unprecedented number of cognitive tasks ( n = 37) and personality surveys ( n = 22), along with data-driven analyses including drift-diffusion and Bayesian modelling, we uncovered the specific psychological signatures of political, nationalistic, religious and dogmatic beliefs. Cognitive and personality assessments consistently outperformed demographic predictors in accounting for individual differences in ideological preferences by 4 to 15-fold. Furthermore, data-driven analyses revealed that individuals' ideological attitudes mirrored their cognitive decision-making strategies. Conservatism and nationalism were related to greater caution in perceptual decision-making tasks and to reduced strategic information processing, while dogmatism was associated with slower evidence accumulation and impulsive tendencies. Religiosity was implicated in heightened agreeableness and risk perception. Extreme pro-group attitudes, including violence endorsement against outgroups, were linked to poorer working memory, slower perceptual strategies, and tendencies towards impulsivity and sensation-seeking-reflecting overlaps with the psychological profiles of conservatism and dogmatism. Cognitive and personality signatures were also generated for ideologies such as authoritarianism, system justification, social dominance orientation, patriotism and receptivity to evidence or alternative viewpoints; elucidating their underpinnings and highlighting avenues for future research. Together these findings suggest that ideological worldviews may be reflective of low-level perceptual and cognitive functions. This article is part of the theme issue 'The political brain: neurocognitive and computational mechanisms'.