Politics, emotion, and reason
An fMRI study of people who strongly identified as either Republican or Democrat showed that making a judgment about their party’s candidate activated brain areas associated with emotion, but not those associated with conscious reasoning. This press release from EurekAlert explains the study, which took place in the last few months before the 2004 election. Participants in the study were given information to evaluate about Bush, Kerry, or a control who was politically neutral (e.g., Tom Hanks), including a statement from the candidate and a contradictory statement that cast doubt on the candidate’s veracity. While they could spot the discrepancy between the two pieces of information for the other side’s candidate, people were less successful at evaluating their own party’s candidate. Furthermore, when evaluating their own candidate, participants’ brains showed increased activity in areas involved in the processing of emotion, but not in areas associated with reasoning, and furthermore not in areas that are involved in the conscious suppression of emotion. It looks like the emotional reactions may be occurring outside of conscious awareness, which might explain why entrenched political opinions (on either side) are sometimes resistant to analysis and change.
And while we’re on the subject of politics, here’s another press release from last month with more disheartening news about the irrational roots of political behavior. This one, about another study conducted before the 2004 election, describes how people who had spent time thinking and writing about their own deaths were more likely to say they would vote for Bush, while those who considered a neutral subject were more likely to say they’d vote for Kerry. Pushing the fear button is obviously part of Bush’s strategy (I’ve seen an analysis of how he uses language to this end, although I can’t find it online any more). The authors of this study advice that we “take pains to resist any efforts by candidates to capitalize on fear-mongering”. Amen, but how likely is that to happen on a large scale?
