Your Brain on Politics

Have you been watching the presidential debates? How did your candidate fare?

I predict you will say that your candidate won the debate, and if I asked someone who favors the other candidate, I predict they would say that his/her candidate won the debate. In fact, immediately after Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama finished their final debate before the November 2008 election, pundits from both sides claimed victory. Some people even said that "Joe the Plumber" won the debate.

How can this be? How is it that two rational people can listen to the same information coming from the two candidates and come to completely different impressions about the results? Well, if you think I am going to tell you who won, based on scientific research, you are wrong. I am much more interested in knowing how people come to these completely different conclusions about these candidates when they have viewed the same objective information.

The answer is simple...we do not think rationally. Well, let me clarify. People do not always think rationally. In fact, much of our thinking is motivated thinking (Showers & Cantor, 1985). That is to say, when people view information about others, when we think about a problem that is relevant to us, when we compare two relevant options, our prior experiences, biases, hopes, and investments influence our thoughts, often away from rationality.

The same bias influences the impressions that people make about presidential candidates. When people hear a political speech from a candidate they support, they remember all of the positive aspects of the speech and fail to remember (or actively minimize) the negative aspects of the speech. The reverse is true for a candidate that people do not like.

Recent research by psychologists have uncovered the mental gymnastics that are required to highlight the positive aspects of a political speech and discount the negative. Drew Westen and his colleagues used fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) to monitor the active, thinking brains of 30 people who were committed to their political parties. Under these scans,
the parts of the brain typically involved in conscious emotion regulation (that is, the suppression of thoughts and emotions; the prefrontal cortex) was more active for partisans viewing information that was threatening to their preferred candidate than these same brain areas were when threatening information was presented for the opposing candidate. When these same people were presented with another slide providing some justification for the contradictory behavior of their preferred candidate, the areas of the brain associated with rewards (the ventral striatum) was more active (Westen, Blagov, Harenski, Kilts, & Hamann, 2006).

The researchers draw the conclusion that contradictory information about one's preferred candidate produces a measurable mental (or neural) defense against this information. In addition, people who support a political candidate will seek out information that resolves the contradiction. People do this because the information that provides an escape from the contradiction is rewarding.

So, the next time you feel excited that your candidate has shown exceptional skill at addressing the attacks from the other candidate, you might wonder if the positive feeling you have is just your ventral striatum acting up. Or, when you can clearly see an explanation for why your candidate said one thing but did another, you might credit the ease with which you can find this alternative explanation to your active prefrontal cortex. In either case, your thinking may or may not be considered rational, but it must be considered motivated.


References:

Showers, C. & Cantor, N. (1985). Social cognition: A look at motivated strategies. Annual Review of Psychology, 36, 275-305.

Westen, D., Blagov, P. S., Harenski, K., Kilts, C., & Hamann, S. (2006). Neural bases of motivated reasoning: An fMRI study of emotional constraints on partisan political judgment in the 2004 U.S. presidential election. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, 1947-1958.