Ever wonder why fear-mongering seems to work so well at the polls—while appeals to reason often leave the electorate cold? A new book <“The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation by Drew Westen> ”applies neuroscience to politics to figure out why the Democrats struggle to push the buttons in voters’ brains.
Web-exclusive commentary
By Sharon Begley
Newsweek
Updated: 9:47 a.m. PT June 27, 2007
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Westen’s thesis is simple. “A dispassionate mind that makes decisions by weighing the evidence and reasoning to the most valid conclusions bears no relation to how the mind and brain actually work.” That’s true when it comes to choosing a significant other, buying a car, and choosing a president. Madison Avenue has known this for decades. Democrats haven’t. Instead, their strategists start from an 18th-century vision of the mind as dispassionate, making decisions by rationally weighing evidence and balancing pros and cons. That assumption is a recipe for high-minded campaigning—and, often, electoral failure. But by recognizing the strides that neuroscience, psychology and, in particular, the science of decision making have made in recent years, Westen argues, politicians can tap into “the emotional brain” that guides most political decisions.
If you think your political decisions are coldly rational, think again. Even when we “rationally” assess a candidate’s position on, say, tax policy or immigration, emotions shape our judgment. (In 2000 the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, famously hostile toward federal intervention in state matters, overturned the decision of the Florida Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore and put the former in the White House. Go figure.) “Behind every reasoned decision is a reason for deciding,” Westen writes. “We do not pay attention to arguments unless they engender our interest, enthusiasm, fear, anger or contempt . . . We do not find policies worth debating if they don’t touch on the emotional implications for ourselves, our families or things we hold dear.” Something you “hold dear” can be, for instance, a principled position in favour of sending more troops to Iraq; you can tell yourself that that position resides in an emotion-free zone, but in all likelihood it reflects feelings of pride, fear, commitment and the like—emotions, all.
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When voters are hooked up to brain-imaging devices while watching candidates, it is emotion circuits and not the rational frontal lobes that are most engaged. When voters assess who won a campaign debate, they almost always choose the candidate they liked better beforehand. The rationality circuit “isn’t typically open for business when partisans are thinking about things that matter to them,” Westen notes. Yet “this is the part of the brain to which Democrats typically target their appeals.”
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