I’m related to as many Republicans as I am Democrats. Maybe more. And yes, some of my best friends lean right. Good, reasonable folk whom I love dearly -- none of whom I have, and none of whom I will, tried to convert to my candidate.
Maybe it’s because I don’t have a political spine. That’s an opinion I shared with a friend recently who’s weighing his own decision in this race and whose response was: “never get into a heated political discussion with those you love. Nothing to gain and everything to lose.”
We’ve entered the days of frenzy in this political election as the candidates sprint to the finish and I’m already so apoplectic that I’m not convinced I’ll make it to November with my sanity intact. (Of interest: between now and when we elect our next President,
Canada may well initiate and conclude their own election cycle. WHY CAN’T WE FOLLOW THEIR EXAMPLE?)
As an act of self-soothing I went looking for research that circulated awhile back regarding the divergent brain chemistries of liberals and conservatives. I found half a dozen media references and then located the actual research at
Nature Neuroscience. My distress was great enough that I dropped $32 on the full text of the research in an effort to understand whether it’s actually possible to sway a conservative to a liberal cause -- or vice versa.
Because this is what strikes me as the
snark flies on Twitter (with me doing my part), and
searching the stream reveals as many conservatives convinced that all is well as it does liberals who are appalled that the Republicans’ hateful rhetoric made prime time: each of us is certain of our convictions.
I know deep in my bones that Barack Obama’s policies are right for America. I expect that his presidency will restore our standing among the nations of the world, lessen the probability of terrorist attacks, and make life here at home more just and equitable for
more of us -- not just for the few wealthy friends of the GOP or the misguided souls who believe they’re on that list.
I know others who share similar convictions about John McCain and his policies. They know that he’s right for America, in the same way I know the same things about Obama.
Can either one of us convince the others that they’re misguided? Is there any hope that folks can be swayed?
In
Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, Gary Klein recounts the research findings of Peer Soelberg regarding decision making. Bear with me -- here’s that passage in full, regarding a study on job-seeking behavior that was conducted in 1967:
Soelberg’s course on decision making at the MIT Sloan School of Management taught students how to perform the classical decision analysis method we call the rational choice strategy. The decision maker:
1. Identifies the set of options.
2. Identifies the ways of evaluating these options.
3. Weights each evaluation dimension.
4. Does the rating.
5. Picks the option with the highest score.
For his Ph.D. dissertation, Soelberg studied the decision strategies his students used to perform a natural task: selecting their jobs as they finished their degrees. He assumed that they would rely on the rational choice strategy.
He was wrong. His students showed little inclination toward systematic thinking. Instead they would make a gut choice. By interviewing his students, Soelberg found he could identify their favorite job choice and predict their ultimate choice with 87 percent accuracy -- up to three weeks before the students themselves announced their choice.
Soelberg had trained his students to use rational methods, yet when it was time for them to make a rational and important choice, they would not do it. Soelberg was also a good observer, and he tried to capture the students’ actual decision strategies.
What did the students do during this time? If asked, they would deny that they had made a decision yet. For them, a decision was just what Soelberg had taught: a deliberated choice between two or more options. To feel that they had made such a decision, they had to go through a systematic process of evaluation. They selected one other candidate as a comparison, and then tried to show that their favorite was as good as or better than the comparison candidate on each evaluation dimension.
Once they had shown this to their satisfaction (even if it meant fudging a little or finding ways to beef up their favorite), then they would announce as their decision the gut favorite that Soelberg had identified much earlier.
They were not actually making a decision; they were constructing a justification.
Guilty as charged. (Emphasis my own, btw.)
Never once have I considered John McCain as a reasonable candidate.
Obama’s been my guy from the beginning.
I suspect this too is true for those in attendance at the Republican National Convention. Of course they didn’t balk when McCain appointed Palin. Of course they didn’t waver after he put us all to sleep last night with his speech.
He’s their man.
All this back and forth about who did and said what and why this does or doesn’t make him or her qualified to govern our country and present us on the world stage isn’t persuasion -- it’s justification.
The piece from Nature Neuroscience --
Neurocognitive Correlates of Liberalism and Conservatism -- held no hope of swaying my opinion. I understood maybe 10 percent of the research, probably because I’m not really up on the relevance of ACC activity or why correlations to ERN amplitudes matter all that much, but I picked my way carefully through the piece and took particular interest in this passage:
Behavioral research suggests that psychological differences between conservatives and liberals map onto the widely-studied self-regulatory process of conflict monitoring. Conflict monitoring is a general mechanism for detecting when one’s habitual response tendency is mismatched with responses required by the current situation, and this function has been associated with neurocognitive activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC).
For example, in the Go/No-Go task used in our study, participants must quickly respond to a frequently presented Go stimulus, such that the “Go” response become habitual. However, on a small proportion of trials, a No-Go stimulus appears, signaling that one’s habitual response should be withheld.
Hence, a No-Go stimulus conflicts with the prepotent Go response tendency. Such response conflict is typically associated with enhanced ACC activity, measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging or event-related potentials (ERPs). We proposed that the differences in conservatives’ and liberals’ responsiveness to complex and potentially conflicting information relates to the sensitivity of this general mechanism for monitoring response conflict.
Why was I interested in this passage? Well, because it led to this tidy conclusion:
Our results are consistent with the view that political orientation, in part, reflects individual differences in the functioning of a general mechanism related to cognitive control and self-regulation.
Stronger conservatism (versus liberalism) was associated with less neurocognitive sensitivity to response conflicts. At the behavioral level, conservatives were also more likely to make errors of commission. Although a liberal orientation was associated with better performance on the response-inhibition task examined here, conservatives would presumably perform better on tasks in which a more fixed response style is optimal.
Or to state it in a tight and tidy way that mostly makes sense to neuroscientists:
Liberals are more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty. ... We ... found that greater liberalism was associated with stronger conflict-related anterior cingulate activity, suggesting greater neurocognitive sensitivity to cues for altering a habitual response pattern.
I can use this in a couple of ways, human creature that I am who’s looking to justify my choice of political candidate.
It reassures me that Barack Obama, as a liberal, is better suited to handle the “informational complexity” and “ambiguity” of the presidency.
But it also introduces the possibility that, as the researchers speculate, “abstract, seemingly ineffable constructs, such as ideology” are driven by the biology of the brain, maybe more than they are by reasoned debate.
That, more than anything else, we’re in the middle of a genetic showdown.
Not saying we are. Just speculating that we might be.
And also wondering if these divergent views -- the way they repulse some, the way they stir up anger and motivate action -- provide the stimulus we need to change and evolve.
p.s. You may have noticed the similarity between the research method used here and that applied by
Project Insight, which came up in a past post about MacArthur Grantee Jennifer Richeson »
