TIME TO PLAY HARDBALL

I noticed a online column in Newsday about a new book by Drew Westen, a psychologist at Emory University and I remembered that I had made a couple of clippings about his work but I never got around to posting. First, here's the title, author and link to the Newsweek column:

This Is Your Brain On Politics
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 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. MT June 27, 2007

Westen's previous work has emphasized how strongly emotions affect our political decisions and I believe that offers some insight into how the GOP Noise Machine is effective. This is from Westen's university website (NOTE: this text is from an earlier copy I made. Now, the blurb is shorter)

Cognition and Emotion: Cognitive and Emotional Constraints on Judgment and Decision Making

Using political data, we have begun testing a model of inference under conditions of ambiguity and emotional significance that integrates connectionist models in cognitive science, models of conflict and compromise in psychodynamic psychology, and models of cognitive dissonance in social psychology. This model proposes that inference about emotionally meaningful events reflects a process of parallel constraint satisfaction, in which the mind equilibrates on a solution that compromises two sets of constraints processed simultaneously: cognitive constraints (data) and emotional constraints (feelings, emotion-laden attitudes, and motives). We tested this model with three studies of people's inferences during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal of 1998, and found that people's political judgments at every point in the scandal bore minimal relation to their knowledge of relevant data but were strongly predicted by their feelings about Democrats and Republicans, Clinton and high-status philandering "alpha males," feminism, and infidelity. We replicated these findings during the contested election of 2000, this time using an experimental design, and similarly found that cognitive and emotional constraints interacted to predict political and legal judgments, but that emotional constraints accounted for most of the variance in people's beliefs about the relative validity of manual versus machine ballot counting.

Download Relevent Articles:> Westen, 1998> Westen, 1999

In her column, Begley quotes Westen on how decisions, political and otherwise, get made:

“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.”

“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.”

The idea isn't that wingnuts are particularly susceptible to emotional arguments but that we all are and to communicate effectively, liberal candidates must pay more attention to the emotional part of the message. As Westen found in a study of the 2004 Presidential elections:

"None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged," Westen said. "Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones."

The brain imaging revealed a consistent pattern. Both Republicans and Democrats consistently denied obvious contradictions for their own candidate but detected contradictions in the opposing candidate.

"The result is that partisan beliefs are calcified, and the person can learn very little from new data," Westen said.