The Political Brain Is an Emotional Brain:
Recent developments in brain imaging scans indicate that it is your emotional brain, and not your rational brain, that ultimately makes decisions on whom you marry, what brand of cereal you buy, the movies you see, and even the final choices you make in the voting booth. Anyone who keeps up with the news can tell you that politics, like religion, is an emotional trigger that greatly affects human behavior and decisions. The long-held view by neuroscientists and psychologists that your brain is largely a cool, rational, dispassionate thinking machine is no longer true. In fact, the human brain has more in common with those of our animal cousins when it comes to how we arrive at important decisions. Studies consistently show that human emotions and our primal instincts play more of a role in deciding who our next president is than the facts and figures of policy issues, political maps, or polling data. It is exactly this reason why candidates spend inordinate amounts of money on TV ads, in billboards, and through social media – they all are affective strategies that tap into your base emotional centers of the brain and influence how you will vote!
When it comes to politics and how people vote, whenever you pit the thinking rational brain against the intuitive, emotional brain, the latter invariably wins. Despite our human superiority in logic, reasoning, mathematics, and science, when it comes down to the final decision in the voting booth, your deeper emotions and primal passions ultimately win out. When you look at all the political ads, debates, and campaign speeches made by the candidates, it’s their innate ability to connect to the emotions of the electorate that ultimately wins the vote. This concept of the political brain as the emotional voting brain is now being substantiated by a growing number of neuroscientists and psychologists.
In the ground-breaking book The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, the author Drew Westen argues that there are three things that ultimately win over voters: emotions toward a particular party and its platform, feelings toward a particular candidate, and emotional reactions toward a candidate’s policy positions. The reason why your emotions play such a crucial role in political elections is due to a concept known as the unconscious confirmation bias. Basically put, when your brain has made an opinion or already reached an unconscious decision, it will then employ the rational brain to gather selective facts and figures as evidence to support your decisions and validate your beliefs.
This aspect of the human brain reveals exactly why liberals and conservatives hold such strong and divergent beliefs on the same political topics such as abortion, gun control, taxation, health care, and marriage equality. No matter how many hard facts and figures candidates use to convince a person otherwise, once a predetermined opinion is grounded in your unconscious emotional brain, will it rarely be swayed by dispassionate logic or rational argument. As a result, this reason accounts for why both liberals and conservatives become equally convinced that existing evidence validates their fundamental respective views. This unconscious confirmation bias explains that even when presented with an overwhelming body of contrary evidence, our subliminal brain will always biasly pick and choose evidence that substantiates and confirms our original beliefs while discarding or reinterpreting the facts that threaten these opinions. It is why the human brain is always biased toward our emotions and deeper passions when it comes to whom and how we vote. (Full article in Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience Vol. 18, No. 11, pp. 1947-1958
Logos versus Pathos in the Brain:
With the recent breakthroughs in brain scans and neural imaging, we now have a clearer window that identifies where exactly in the brain we make our decisions and how we ultimately vote. The human brain, like the human psyche, has both a rational and empirical logos area and a subjective and emotional pathos part, which are often in conflict. In Westen’s study, a number of partisan test subjects, each affiliated with one particular political party, were shown videos of political candidates from the opposing party expressing a contrary argument for a specific policy position. The brain scans of these volunteers showed something completely novel and fascinating. When people were exposed to images of candidates, whom they disliked, presenting clear and objective facts on a certain policy point, the area of the brain associated with logical and rational decision making (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) was relatively inactive and quiet. The areas of the brain connected to our emotions (orbital frontal cortex), conflict resolution (anterior cingulate), and our pleasure-reward system (ventral striatum) were all highly active when test subjects were reacting to the policy facts and figures presented by the opposing candidate.
The research concluded that the brains of people watching political videos showed no increased activity in the rational and logical areas connected with processing facts and figures or asscociated with empirical reasoning. Rather, the parts of the brain that appeared to be the most active during the experiment were the areas connected with primal emotional responses, conflict resolution, and in the rewarding of selective behavior. It argues the point exactly how the unconscious confirmation bias actually occurs in our brain and in our decision making. When already having made a firm decision, your brain will take the facts and figures to either validate that belief or twist and manipulate the data to support your existing opinion, a process that takes place not in your rational and empirical logos brain, but exclusively in your subliminal emotional pathos brain. It is this neurological process that manfests in the political arena and accounts for why political candidates have a greater success of victory when speaking to the unconscious, emotional brain of a potential voter.
The Liberal versus Conservative Brain:
Medical research into the brain also reveals another startling piece of information – the brains of liberals and conservatives are actually different! While the subtle dissimilarities between the brains of males and females appear to perpetuate the battle of the sexes, neuroscience now similarly shows that the reason the political parties, like the sexes, always disagree might have a basis in neurology! While it’s not the intention to perpetuate stereotypes and to say that every liberal or conservative thinks the exact same way, more evidence points that there exist distinct correlations with brain and neural processing between the two political parties. Let’s explore just how exactly the brains of liberals and conservatives function differently.
The various studies measured specific involuntary responses in the nervous system, such as eye movement toward disturbing images and physical reaction to loud noises, in order to map their corresponding neurological activity in different parts of the brain. While the findings might be either controversial or comforting to those in both political parties, repeated studies point to an astounding conclusion. In the numerous experiments conducted, liberals appear to have more activity happening in the anterior cingulate cortex, the area in the brain associated with the ability to experience greater resilience to fear and tolerance to the unknown. On the other hand, the brains of conservatives when mapped were shown to have more activity in the right amygdala, the area responsible for greater sensitivity to change and reactivty to uncertainty. This difference in brain activity shows up not in only in how liberals and conservatives communicate and think differently, but also in how their brains are actually programmed to see the world differently!
Duke University psychiatrist Gregg Appelbaum explains the remarkable findings in a different way saying “the studies point toward conservatives’ tendency to avoid something called self-harm, while liberals avoid collective group harm.” While it’s not fair to stereotype all conservatives and liberals into either general category, the findings concur that there exists a general correlation between brain activity and political opinions, which ultimately determines how we vote. Basically, when exposed to images that illicit fear and uncertainty, if you tend to be a liberal the emotional part of your brain, responsible for feeling greater tolerance, will generally have a stronger capacity to cope with sudden changes in your environment. If you’re a conservative, the same images will trigger activity in the emotional brain associated with the greater need to experience precaution and judicious behavior when confronted with the unknown. As might be clear, both qualities of adaptability and precaution are vital tools for our human survival. In essence, the conclusions are not trying to state that being a liberal or a conservative is better than the other. The findings, however, observe that the brain behaviors of liberals and conservatives offer a profound neurological explanation exactly why the two parties have such a hard time seeing eye to eye.
According to Westen and similar research conducted by other neuroscientists, neuroscience won’t be able to predict one hundred percent of the time how a person will vote. The studies, however, can remarkably indicate within an 80-85% likelihood if a person will tend to have conservative or liberal leanings, based entirely on the different emotional regions in the brain that fire when exposed to certain policy issues. So basically, politics all comes down to emotions! How a person will make his or her decision when voting has more to do with how the right emotions will unconsciously confirm a person’s predetermined beliefs about a candidate or a critical piece of policy. According to what all the neuroscience studies attest, our rational, thinking brain tends to take the back seat in the voting booth. The research can be nicely summarized in a point I’d like to say is true: “Ultimately, the success of a politician isn’t in moving to the left or to the right but moving the hearts and emotional brains of the electorate.” Dr. Jay Kumar.
HAPPY VOTING!
Dr. Jay Kumar
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