From Dr. Jay Kumar - Brain, Politics, & Emotions: How We Vote
Oct-25-2012

We all would agree that liberals and conservatives think differently when it comes to their political views and their ideal choice for candidate for office, but do their brains function differently? A growing body of evidence from social neuroscience says that it might just be the case, and the reason for this has to do with how the emotional brains of liberals and conservatives respond differently to political information.
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.

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Posted by Ken at 6:49 PM - Link to this entry  |  Share this entry  |  Print