The Political Brain The Role Of Emotion In Deciding The Fate Of The Nation

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The Political Brain is a groundbreaking investigation into the role of emotion in determining the political life of the nation. For two decades Drew Westen, professor of psychology and psychiatry at Emory University, has explored a theory of the mind that differs substantially from the more “dispassionate” notions held by most cognitive psychologists, political scientists, and economists — and Democratic campaign strategists. The idea of the mind as a cool calculator that makes decisions by weighing the evidence bears no relation to how the brain actually works. When political candidates assume voters dispassionately make decisions based on “the issues,” they lose. That’s why only one Democrat has been re-elected to the presidency since Franklin Roosevelt — and only one Republican has failed in that quest. I do not know how much of this was consciously intended by Clinton and his consultants. I suspect that much of it was, although some of the emotional overtones and sequencing of images might well have simply reflected Clinton's extraordinary emotional intelligence and gut-level, implicit political horse sense. Read the excerpt from the book below, watch the report and interview with Drew Westen on Newsnight, Wednesday 15 August and let us know your thoughts. And don't forget there's plenty of other titles in the Newsnight Book Club. Four categories of stimulus words were used which varied along an evaluative (positive and negative) and a non-evaluative (political and non-political) dimension. As non-political stimuli, we selected 10 extremely positive (e.g. ‘surprise’ and ‘rainbow’) and 10 extremely negative (e.g. ‘slaughter’ and ‘misery’) words from two lists of Dutch normative studies ( Hermans and De Houwer, 1994; Van Der Goten et al., 1999). Individual sets of political stimuli were composed for each participant prior to the experiment. At least 3 days before the start of the experiment, participants evaluated a list of political words (including political issues and names of politicians) on 7-point scales ranging from extremely negative (−3), neutral or unknown (0), to extremely positive (+3) ( Crites and Cacioppo, 1996). Because we were only interested in the extremely evaluated words, we selected 10 positive and 10 negative words which were rated as +3 or −3, respectively, for each participant. Jost JT, Nam HH, Amodio DM, Van Bavel JJ. 2014Political neuroscience: the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Polit. Psychol. 35, 3-42. (10.1111/pops.12162)

When confronted with potentially troubling political information, a network of neurons becomes active that produces distress. Whether this distress is conscious, unconscious, or some combination of the two we don’t know.

The Political Brain is a groundbreaking investigation into the role of emotion in determining the political life of the nation. For two decades Drew Westen, professor of psychology and psychiatry at Emory University, has explored a theory of the mind that differs substantially from the more "dispassionate" notions held by most cognitive psychologists, political scientists, and economists -- and Democratic campaign strategists. The idea of the mind as a cool calculator that makes decisions by weighing the evidence bears no relation to how the brain actually works. When political candidates assume voters dispassionately make decisions based on "the issues," they lose. That's why only one Democrat has been re-elected to the presidency since Franklin Roosevelt -- and only one Republican has failed in that quest. In The Political Brain Drew Westen, professor of psychology and psychiatry at Emory University, examines the role of emotion in determining national politics. Westen looks at how politicians capture the hearts and minds of the electorate and suggests ways in which they might better appeal to voters' brains. Definitely! It is a privilege to work in a field that is still in its infancy and so rapidly changing and expanding – it meant that we were continuously learning about novel approaches and cutting-edge findings throughout the editorial process. For example, we were excited to learn about the power of computational simulations in shedding light on different sub-profiles of ideological actorsand the double-edged sword of confirmation bias. We were also impressed by ideas of how cyclical self-reinforcing loops can sculpt gender ideologiesand ideological obsession and radicalizationmore generally. The papers even featured rare brain lesion studiesin the context of political ideology, and so the theme issue really is a fresh, novel, and rigorous contribution to the literature that we feel will take the discipline forward. How was your experience of being a Guest Editor on Phil Trans B?

Drew Westen received his B.A. at Harvard, an M.A. in Social and Political Thought at the University of Sussex (England), and his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at the University of Michigan, where he subsequently taught for six years. For several years he was Chief Psychologist at Cambridge Hospital and Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. He is a commentator on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and lives in Atlanta. The latest issue of Philosophical Transactions B is on ‘ The political brain: neurocognitive and computational mechanisms '. Guest Editors Dr Leor Zmigrod (University of Cambridge) and Professor Manos Tsakiris (Royal Holloway, University of London) tell us how this issue came about, and why it is so important to conduct original and innovative research on the psychology of ideology at this time. Tell us about the idea behind this theme issue and how it came about.The implications for Democrats should be equally clear: Stop worrying about offending those who consider Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell moral leaders because their minds won’t bend to the left. Indeed, the failure of the Democratic Party for much of the last decade to define itself in opposition to anyone or anything has created a Maxwell House Majority convinced that the only coffee the Democrats are capable of brewing is lukewarm and tepid—tested by pollsters to insure that it’s not too hot or too strong—and served up with stale rhetoric. And they’re right.