"Is Political Persuasion A Big, Fat Waste Of Time?
by Joe Gandelman
If you've ever wondered whether it's possible to change most people's minds on politics, here's an answer for you that's actually grounded in research:
Probably not. Dick Meyer, Editorial Director of CBS News.com, writes in an online column:
Is political persuasion mostly useless? Is the percentage of people essentially immune to rational argument about political things increasing?
A psychologist in Atlanta and a business school professor in Syracuse, N.Y., have interesting observations on these sorts of questions from the entirely different perspectives of neuroscience and public opinion research. The good news may be that the partisan lout in your office who absolutely will not listen to reason may not be at fault; he may just be a slave to his ventromedial prefrontal cortex. The bad news is that these louts may be becoming more prevalent — and more loutish.
At issue is something that becomes more evident every day. Many political partisans get so emotionally involved in issues that taking stands on issues becomes less a process of looking at information from a variety of sources and making decisions than of protecting and defending belief systems. A conflicting fact seemingly endangers a cherished belief system and therefore must be ignored, discredited or simply denied as fact. Writes Meyer:
At Emory University, psychologist Drew Westen and his team conducted what they believe is the first study of "the neural basis of any form of political decision making." They did this by using brain imaging to study people as they processed political information during the 2004 campaign.
To rape and pillage fine science with rough paraphrasing, this is what they discovered: When 30 self-described partisans were presented with contradictory quotes about the candidates (President Bush supporting, then denouncing Ken Lay; Sen. John Kerry supporting, then denouncing a Social Security overhaul), it was the portions of the brain that process emotion, not rational thinking, that became active. "The thinking caps went off and the feeling caps went on," is how Westen put it to me.
Normally, Westen says, a brain faced with contradictory information will fire up the zones where reason or rational thought happens. The 30 partisans in this study were presented with contradictory quotes from Bush and Kerry, but also from Hank Aaron, Tom Hanks and the writer William Styron. They processed the information about the non-politicians with the reasoning centers of the brain. It was politics that short-circuited them. ("This is your brain; this is your brain on politics.")
It would be reasonable to ask whether all brains — not just partisan ones — respond to political information emotionally. Westen says the answer is clearly no, that research does demonstrate that centrists or independents are more able to process rational and non-emotional political information.
But Westen's MRIs show that is clearly not the case with political contradictions processed by a partisan brain. That process is almost entirely emotional, heating up regions of the brain that govern things like forgiveness, relief and pleasure. The reasoning zones stayed ice cold.
Another finding that's fascinating:
According to Arthur Brooks, a professor at the business school at Syracuse University, the number of partisan brains is increasing. And they may be becoming more partisan; more precisely, they seem to hate their opponents more.
Brooks even found data to support the thesis that political demonization is on the upswing:
Brooks also found a disturbing level of what he calls "personal demonization" in 2004 Another prestigious, long-running survey, the American National Election Survey, collects public opinion data using what it calls "feeling thermometers" — for example, on a scale of zero to 100, zero being the sub-human low, how do you feel about members of Congress? Or conservatives? Or liberals?
Scores below 20 are very rare. Brooks says, "No one gets zeroes, not even Hitler."
But in 2004, lots of people gave out zeroes. They were — surprise, surprise — self-described liberals and conservatives, and they gave zeroes out to their ideological enemies.
Meyers conclude:
This is not evidence that America is becoming more polarized or that we are fighting a culture war. While it may be evidence that the numbers of extremists are increasing slightly, and that their extremism and intolerance is increasing, it is not evidence that the huge, moderate middle — that part of the population able to process political information with cold reason — is substantially shrinking or becoming more bitterly divided and less tolerant.
All this research may be evidence that some shifts in how we process political information and argument are becoming hard-wired — in brains, in culture and in media. It seems obvious that the people who hang around blogs, talk radio, cable shout shows and the Congress of the United States are both extreme and emotional. Now we can see it on MRIs.
If anything, that should be motivation for everyone to double-check their instant reactions — and alleged arguments — to anything political.
Our view? Meyer hits the nail on the head. The emotion factor is HUGE now in American politics. There are some people who think that to be insulting, loud and verbally aggressive is the same as being intelligent and that the loudest mouth (or most flaming post or email) "wins."
The decline in the automatic acceptance of fact-based reporting and the rise of news consumers who now want to read news slanted in way that agrees with their preconceived views (on the right and left) is yet another sign that it's no longer a "given" that people harvest info, sift through and analyze what they have in front of them, and then decide. Rather, many people now seem to pick up factoids that fit into what they already believe, and ignore ones that conflict with what they already "know."
Instead of the highly-touted global community, in political terms modern-day America increasingly seems moving towards more of a tribal community. Or to a model where politics is like sports and political parties are considered like sports teams: you always defend YOUR team and demonize and dump on the other team (even if the other team does exactly what your team has done minutes before) — and keep focused only on the goal (your team winning).
Except in modern day America, as more political partisan athletes leap onto the playing field, you wonder if there are sufficient referees.
NOTE: We only ran excerpts of Meyer's column. Read it in its entirety."
themoderatevoice.com |
