29 October 2008

For voters, the political is psychological

An article in the Association for Psychological Science's AP Observer points out what TEDsters like Jonathan Haidt have known all along: Our psychology, and our emotions, likely play a larger part in how we cast our votes than any careful consideration of the issues. As Haidt reminds us in his 2008 TEDTalk, ideology, whether liberal or conservative, is based on implicit psychological preferences, with liberals valuing new experiences and flexibility while conservatives favor stability and tradition.

Among the fascinating studies rounded up in the APO story, we like the 2005 study from Emory University that showed how our feelings about candidates and political events, such as Bill Clinton's 1998 impeachment trial, are often based almost wholly on party affiliation and participants' emotions, rather than the facts that we know about the candidates or the situation. In other words, when we hear news we don't like about politicians we do like, we simply rationalize it away.

Like a story out of Michael Shermer's TEDTalk, the study found that people have a unique brain response to negative news that they hear about candidates from their own party, using a part of the posterior cingulate cortex associated with the ability to forgive.

And how to explain those pesky swing voters, the obsession of the US news media right now? Are they using reason and scholarship to guide them to a more careful consideration of complicated issues than the rest of us? Not necessarily. The research shows that swing voters also use instinct to determine who they will vote for, choosing candidates just like the rest of us do, on two main criteria: charisma, and how similar a given candidate is to them. Researchers also found that swing voters were bad at predicting who they would vote for, underestimating their capacity to change their minds. Who knew? -- Sierra Feldner-Shaw

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