Great Newsweek Article on why Fear Works in Political Ads

Newsweek has an interesting article in this week's edition, which deals with why appeals to fear and anger work better in political ads than appeals to reason. This is a quote from the article:

Fear makes people more likely to go to the polls and vote, which reflects the power of negative emotions in general. "Negative emotions such as fear, hatred and disgust tend to provoke behavior more than positive emotions such as hope and happiness do," says Harvard Universitypsychology researcher Daniel Gilbert. Perhaps paradoxically, the power of fear to move voters can be most easily understood when it fails to—that is, when an issue lacks the ability to strike terror in citizens' hearts. Global warming is such an issue. Yes, Hurricane Katrina was a terrifying example of what a greenhouse world would be like, and Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" scared some people into changing their light bulbs to energy-miserly models. But barely 5 percent of voters rank global warming as the issue that most concerns them. There is little public clamor to spend the kind of money that would be needed to change our energy mix to one with a smaller carbon footprint, or to make any real personal sacrifices.

If you are interested in the interaction between politics and the biology of the brain, check out this article.

Are There Liberal and Conservative Brains?

The L.A. Times posted a story on its website dated Monday, September 10, 2007, about a research study that supposedly proves that liberals and conservatives process information differently. There have been studies that show that liberals and conservatives think differently, but this study goes beyond those studies and explores the processing of information. Here is a quote from the article:

Analyzing the data, Sulloway said liberals were 4.9 times as likely as conservatives to show activity in the brain circuits that deal with conflicts, and 2.2 times as likely to score in the top half of the distribution for accuracy.

Sulloway said the results could explain why President Bush demonstrated a single-minded commitment to the Iraq war and why some people perceived Sen. John F. Kerry, the liberal Massachusetts Democrat who opposed Bush in the 2004 presidential race, as a flip-flopper for changing his mind about the conflict.

Based on the results, he said, liberals could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas.

"There is ample data from the history of science showing that social and political liberals indeed do tend to support major revolutions in science," said Sulloway, who has written about the history of science and has studied behavioral differences between conservatives and liberals.

If this research study is accurate, then the question becomes whether how such brains are distributed across the United States population. That is, are there more "conservative brains" or more "liberal brains"? Are there differences in where such brains are located? Do people with "liberal" brains tend to live in areas where there is more change? It will be interesting to see how this information develops over the next few years.

UPDATE: Here is an article on the same study that gives more background on how liberals and conservatives differ in their cognitive styles.

The Public Information Paradox: Putting Out Good Information May Just Reinforce Bad Information

Okay, so have you ever wondered why a fairly large percentage of Americans believe that Iraq and Hussein were involved in the attacks on September 11, 2001? Although the Bush Administration shares a good deal of the blame, its deceit isn't the whole reason. Part of the reason has to do with the human brain. Consider the following quote from this article in the September 4, 2007 Washington Post:

The psychological insights yielded by the research, which has been confirmed in a number of peer-reviewed laboratory experiments, have broad implications for public policy. The conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information. But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths.

This phenomenon may help explain why large numbers of Americans incorrectly think that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in planning the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and that most of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi. While these beliefs likely arose because Bush administration officials have repeatedly tried to connect Iraq with Sept. 11, the experiments suggest that intelligence reports and other efforts to debunk this account may in fact help keep it alive.

This research puts politicians and public officials who face opponents who aren't afraid to lie in a bad situation. If they ignore the lie, then people might believe it is true who otherwise wouldn't believe it is true. Taking the lie on, however, by putting out facts refuting the lie might also contribute to the lie being better remembered by people who have heard it. It is a fascinating article and one that you might want to take the time to read.

Logic Doesn't Win Campaigns, Emotion Wins Campaigns

Earlier this year we posted this entry on how Democrats need to relate emotionally to voters. In the July 29, 2007 edition of the Washington Post, Drew Westin, a psychologist who writes on the voters and campaigns, has an excellent article in the Washington Post.

The following is from the article:

When you hear a pollster or strategist say, "We've got 'em beat on the issues," you know you're on the dispassionate river, and you know you're going under. By my count, voters disagreed with Ronald Reagan on about 75 percent of "the issues." But they liked him. They believed he would restore America's greatness. They voted with their values.

So do Democrats, but their candidates too often hide their values in the fine print of their policies. Democratic pundits, strategists and primary voters require their candidates to do precisely the things that lose general elections: to offer their 16-point energy plans rather than to offer their life stories, their values, their visions and a couple of well-chosen "signature issues."

Westin goes on in the article to describe what he thinks, based on his research regarding voters, that Democrats need to do:

Data from thousands of voters surveyed since the late 1940s suggest that voters tend to ask four questions (in this order) that determine how they vote:

· How do I feel about the candidates' parties and their principles?

· How does this candidate make me feel?

· How do I feel about this candidate's personal characteristics, such as integrity, leadership and empathy?

· How do I feel about this candidate's stands on issues that matter to me?

Candidates who focus toward the top of this hierarchy and work their way down generally win. They drink from the wellsprings of partisan sentiments, which account for more than 80 percent of votes. They tell emotionally compelling stories about who they are and what they believe in

Westin was once on a radio program on public radio and he said that Democratic candidates act like the voters are like Thomas Jefferson, sitting around Monticello, reading essays, and pondering politics and policy. Well, most of us have too much going on in our lives to be TJ. We have to worry about our jobs, our families, our relationships, our finances, and everything else that makes up our day, to ponder politics. That's why most voters use emotion to cut through the clutter surrounding campaigns.

The problem, of course, with using emotion is that voters can be manipulated. Republicans know this and are good at it. Democrats make their jobs easier by not using emotional arguments to sell themselves, their party, and their policies.

We are not talking about manipulating voters, but we are talking about presenting politics in such a way that voters can emotionally connect to our candidates, our party, and can emotionally relate to what we want to do if elected. FDR understood, this. Harry Truman understood this. JFK understood this. LBJ understood this. Bill Clinton certainly understood this. The question is does the current group of Democratic candidates understand this?

Are People "Hard-Wired" for Political Views?

Melinda Wenner wrote an articlethat appeared on www.livescience.com in which she reported on a study that suggests that there is some genetic predisposition for political philosophy. Here is a quote from her article:

People who are more conscientious and prefer order, structure and closure in their lives tend to be more conservative, whereas creative people who are open to new experiences tend to be more politically liberal, says John Jost, a psychologist at New York University who conducted an overview of previous studies involving a total of more than 22,000 participants from 12 countries.

The article points out that one psychologist believes that environmental factors or situations that people encounter in their lives determines approximately one-half of political preferences. Approximately 40-50% seems to be based in genetics, not so much that people are genetically inclined to be liberal or conservative, but that they are genetically inclined to have certain values or react to situations in a particular way.

This interplay of genetics and experience might explain why there are "conservative" Democrats and "liberal" Republicans. Their experiences lead them in one direction, while their genetic make-up leads them in a different direction.

Psychology Today Article on Political Ideology & Personality

Okay, so we have all instinctly known that there are innate personality differences between liberals and conservatives, but it is nice to have proof. If you click on the link in this entry's title, you will see an article that explores those differences. Conservatives respond more to threats that involve death and are more organized in their personal lives. Liberals like color and are messier. The article also explains why Republicans use ads that convey implied or explicit threats such as the ad that the Bush campaign ran in 2004 with the wolves or the ad that Reagan ran in 1984 with the bear lumbering through the woods. What the article also points out, though, is that research indicates that simply asking people to stop and analyze the information they are being given leads to a decrease in susceptibility to this kind of psychological manipulation.

Human Compassion Goes Down as Number of Victims Goes Up

If you click on the link in this entry's title you can read an article about a study in human compassion. The author of the study concludes that as the number of victims goes up, human compassion goes down. He concludes that this is one reason why humans will respond emotionally to reports about one human in trouble, but not to reports of large scale suffering.

Although the author's conclusion is open to debate, it is a very provocative thesis. Of course, as the American aid response to Hurricane Katrina shows, there are millions of humans who are greatly affected by scenes of mass tragedy. Yet, news stories about events that affect one or a small number of humans do bring about intense responses.

Think of the emotional responses to the news story about the child who fell down the well back in the nineties and was rescued. There was an intense interest in that story. Or the story about the miners who were trapped down in West Virginia. That was also intensely followed.

Maybe its because we can see how are actions can affect one person, but find it much harder to see how our actions can affect a large number of people. Maybe there is something in our make-up that emotionally protects us from being overwhelmed by reports of mass suffering.

This study does have political implications. If you are interested in bringing about a societal response to a problem, like say the lack of health insurance for millions of Americans, don't cite statistics, rather tell a story about how the lack of insurance affects just one child or one family. Listeners will be able to make an emotional connection and once that connection is made, they will be able to then understand what the statistics mean.