October 30th, 2008

Shortcutting Politics

The founders of the United States didn’t have the advantages of fMRI brain imaging and had no concept of the amygdala, but they were hesitant about political parties and political campaigning nonetheless. Fearful that a “torrent of angry and malignant passions will be let loose,” Alexander Hamilton railed against political parties in the first Federalist Paper, saying the parties would try to “increase the number of their converts by the loudness of their declamations and the bitterness of their invectives.” [...]

When the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal broke in March 1998, the psychologists quizzed participants to gauge their knowledge of Clinton and the details of the scandal. Then they asked emotion-based questions about how participants felt about Clinton as a person, how they felt about the Democratic and Republican parties, and how they felt about infidelity in general. Months later, before the Congressional impeachment trial began in December, they called the participants back and asked them a series of questions along the lines of “Do you think what the president has been accused of doing meets the standard set forth in the Constitution for an impeachable offense?” Using only what they knew about the respondents’ emotions, the researchers were able to correctly predict their views on impeachment 85 percent of the time. Knowledge meant little: When they factored in what the respondents actually knew about the situation and the Constitutional requirements for impeachment, they only improved the accuracy of their predictions by three percent. [...]

Westen and colleagues [also] used neuroimaging to look at the neural responses of individuals who described themselves as partisan. They showed the participants one of three groups of slides: one group about their party’s candidate, one about the other party’s candidate, or one about a neutral control subject. In each group, the first slide revealed a position the politician had taken, and the second depicted a contradiction — something the candidate had done or said that seemed to be contrary to what the first slide was saying. Not only were the participants unable to see the contradiction for their own candidate, but the neuroimaging also showed that they were regulating their emotional response. [...]

Because it is impossible to know everything there is to know, humans — and as it turns out lots of other species as well — use cognitive shortcuts when necessary to help the make a lot of life’s decisions. These mental shortcuts are not foolproof, but they’re convenient and good enough most of the time. [...]

Harvard psychologist and APS Fellow and Charter Member Ellen Langer observed similar rule-based behavior in a typical office setting. She had researchers ask if they could cut in line to use a copy machine. When they simply said, “Excuse me, may I use the copy machine?”, only 60 percent of the subjects complied. When the researchers gave a reason — “Excuse me, may I use the copy machine because I’m in a rush?” — 94 percent said yes. Langer tested this one more time with the phrase, “Excuse me, may I use the copy machine because I need to make some copies,” and again 93 percent of respondents agreed — despite the fact that “I need to make some copies” is not really a very good reason for cutting in line. [...]

The way Langer and Cialdini describe it, people hear the word “because” and assume that there is a good reason. That is to say, the word “because” is a shortcut people use to distinguish between good arguments and bad.

Link to Article in the Association of Psychological Science Observer

This is just one theory that is presented in a quite informative article. It would be interesting for me to see any kind of follow-up to these types of studies. I believe that the majority of people that would read and comprehend exactly what these experiments proved, would place themselves in an “elite” bracket above the general population — and thus argue against being guilty (not quite the right word) of the shortcutting. Even when confronted with immediate and provable results about how (physiologically and psychologically) they shortcutted logic paths, I’m not sure any subject would be able to recognize and respond with a critical analysis of themselves. I’m certainly not equipped with that kind of introspective superpowers.

We vote on what we feel. It’s a hard thing for science to explain.