Politics and Neuroscience
This is a work in progress - there will be frequent changes to this post.
First posted 2020.06.12, updated: 2020.09.02 modestly
My Credentials
I am NOT a scientist of any sort. I have doctorate level graduate degrees in moral theology and law, and 30 years of experience in computer technology. I am an older white gentleman, and a grandfather. I ran for elected office a few times at the city level. There - my total credentials.
My Values
I am persuaded that human life is incredibly priceless. In this vast universe, it would appear that the entire clockwork machine is winding its way down to nothing. We - living beings - are the only things we are aware of that grow, create, inspire, hope and love. Living things are amazing and priceless. Intelligent life is exceedingly rare - and not very "intelligent". We are sophisticated apes, governed mostly by emotion and care, not rational thinking. We need help to "nudge" ourselves to be the best for our long term survival.
I am very worried about our near term future. I think that in order to survive, we must learn more about how our brain works. Recent history shows that a rational, thinking approach to self government is not very effective. Those who are using a "different" approach are carrying off the prize. To counter that we need to understand the best research into how humans operate, to help ourselves do the best we can for human progress.
This post is a collection of some research and ideas on that topic.
There are two sections:
Rules - Shorthand notes for the majority of us who find it difficult to read at length.
At Length - Longer text, and some articles and books that support the "rules", with annotations. These are in a logical order of sorts, so start reading at the top.
What to do with this?
If you personally know a politician, send this to them. Ideally, it would benefit all of us if we could persuade our government and research labs to investigate this problem and identify a "path to rational living". How do we move all of humankind to a new level of intelligent life? Haidt has a few
suggestions, but the research on this is pretty poor. Efforts in this direction in the past have been largely poetical and inspirational. We need some better science here.
You can also comment at the bottom to help improve this. Thanks.
SO - how do we influence people in the world of politics in the most effective way?
Rules
- Talk to the elephant - not the rider.
As Jonathan Haidt has shown, we are like an elephant. We think we are the rider on top of the elephant telling it where to go. In fact, the elephant is going wherever it wants. We are following along, thinking we are in charge of it.
The rider is the rational part of us - our brain and "thinking". The elephant is our gut - emotions, values, traditions, our tribe. That part is in charge of where we are going. Talk to the elephant!
- Talk about values, morals, principles.
Our gut, our elephant, is all about emotions, values, feelings. Your conversation has to be with that part, not ideas and arguments or evidence. In fact, if you bring someone good evidence that contradicts their feelings or beliefs, it will further confirm those beliefs. It's an automatic protective mechanism in our brain. Instead, speak to their fears, their hopes. Offer hope and concrete plans to solve problems - not just hopeful promises. Empathize - understand that people are afraid - they are not stupid or ignorant - just afraid. Do NOT argue. At the most, you can try to raise a glimmer of a doubt - nothing more. AND, you might just learn something as well.
- Ignore the other side.
Do not repeat what "they" say, do not even mention their name, do not criticize them.
Quick, do NOT think of an elephant - you just did. Ignore the elephant in the room. There is no rational argument that will persuade or counter their statements. If you mention them, you add to their exposure and audience. If you criticize them, or their followers, you shore up their defenses and make them even stronger in defense. IGNORE them. Above all, do not call them names - understand how afraid they are.
- The little stuff matters - it's patterns all the way down.
Our brain is a very sophisticated pattern recognition engine. It makes survival decisions in sub-second time. It reads face, posture, tone, instantly. We are mostly unaware of the process. Everything you do, say, and even think, will make an impression on your audience. Be careful. Be honest. Be real. Unless you are a masterful actor or a psychopath, your personal integrity leaks out all the time. Make sure it is something you are proud of. Be mindful, spend some time with your own values and hopes and fears. Learn how to share those. It builds bridges.
- Listen for feelings, and reflect them back.
When you meet someone one on one, the above rules still matter - but first you need to really LISTEN. Listen with your eyes for their feelings, emotions. Then reflect those back to make it clear you hear them. That starts to build a "trust bridge". You may not be able to persuade them of anything, but you can gain their trust, which is a lot more important. This is not manipulation - this is caring and trust and communicating. It is how humans work.
At Length
1. Talk to the elephant, not the rider.
This was the first book I read along these lines. Kahneman won the "Nobel" Prize for economics, and he is a psychologist. That alone is interesting. His research makes it very clear that most decisions that we make are FAST ones - done by our pattern recognition engine, with very little input from our rational selves. We CAN be rational - but it is a lot of work and uses a lot of energy. He does not explore how we might help improve this situation, but he has clearly documented it.
Our implicit worldview is that we are totally rational beings. We think about things, and we decide what we are gong to do and why. A bit of scientific inquiry proves that this is rarely the case.
Daniel Kahneman and
Amos Tversky discovered that with a number of interesting experiments, described in detail in this fine book:
Thinking Fast and Slow. . He and Amos devised some ingenious experiments, and studied the works of many others. The book is a great resource, as it describes the research in detail - it is often hard to believe what they uncovered. Get it, read it - you will be persuaded. Here are a few of the findings.
- Election Prediction: People were shown pictures of candidates for a political office, and asked to guess the winner. They guessed correctly in 70% of the cases, by just looking at the pictures for a fraction of a second. The winners tend to have a strong chin and a confident smile.
- Illusion of Understanding or Expertise: Kahneman was put in charge of selecting recruits for officer training in the Israeli military. He had a psychology degree, so he seemed qualified. His team ran an experiment where the candidates had to get a large log and themselves over a wall, without touching the wall. It can be done, but they were looking for leadership qualities, not physical agility. After a year or so of doing this, they decided to look at their results - which candidates had been successful in officer training. The result - 50% of their selections were successful. They could have flipped a coin. But the next time they ran the exercise, they were still sure that their recommendations were correct - even with good information, they could not shake the illusion that they understood what they were doing.
- Investments. That same illusion of expertise colors most investment decisions. If you are heavily invested in the market, you really need to read this chapter. It is literally true that throwing darts at a board works just as well as any analysis of companies.
- Confirmation Bias: We surround ourselves with information that matches our beliefs. If something does not, we avoid it, explain it, forget it. Contrary information can even make us commit more strongly to our belief.
- Threat Avoidance Dominates: We are much more worried about losing things and avoiding dangers than we are about creating solutions. We will hold on to a losing side until the bitter end, instead of cutting our losses.
- Gambler's Fallacy: We think our odds improve the longer we play - in fact they NEVER change, no matter how long we are losing.
- Cognitive Dissonance: We cannot hold on to two ideas that do not work together, so we change our ideas to match our actual actions.
- Anchoring Effect: Our decisions are easily shifted by the mere mention of an extreme alternative. If I am negotiating a price, and the other party makes a ridiculous offer - I should leave immediately and restart the conversation later. The mere mention of a number that is outside my price range will shift my range significantly. It is almost impossible to avoid this.
- Nutrition is important. The decisions made by a parole board shortly before lunch are very different that those made after lunch. If you are the candidate, and you have a good case, you want them to be well nourished.
- Additional Resources:
Haidt, Jonathan,
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
This is a remarkable book, and well worth your time to read. It covers the author's exploration of how conservative and progressive people differ in their values and thinking. The image of speaking to the elephant is his wisdom. All of this comes from experiments with people around the world. For a nice brief summary of the idea, see this resource:
https://moralfoundations.org/
Here are the key ideas:
- We are right! They are wrong. We are by nature self-righteous bigots. And that’s NOT a problem – it is normal! We are always absolutely certain that we are right.
- We go with our gut. Evolution has given us this gift of rapid decision making. If we were not so primed to jump to rapid conclusions, we would never make any decisions. Just imagine making a purely rational decision about what cereal to buy in the aisle at the grocery store.
- Thinking comes after the fact. We marshal other ideas to support our gut call. Rational arguments on the other side just confirm our belief. You can’t make the dog happy by wagging its tail. We see contrary ideas as threats to our person, and they shore up our defenses.
- We tend to be a bit more conservative than not. It’s what worked! The guy who first tried that strange mushroom did not leave any kids. The ones who built a unusual house perished in the storm.
- We work off 5 basic moral imperatives that are in our genes. They pretty much govern how we work. The flavor of the imperatives changes a bit given our “world view” or social culture, but they are key to our rapid decisions. There are hundreds of complex things going on in our gut, but these five are a handy shorthand.
- Progressives / Conservatives are different. Progressives tend to focus on just two of the moral rules, while most Conservatives seem to use them all. Libertarians are different. Haidt thinks the propensity to one or other perspective has some biological basis, but it can be "moved".
- We are Tribal. Team or tribal membership is a big part of us. And our tribal identity blinds us to the real world. We take our values from our tribe, the culture we live in, our group.
- The five+1 foundations of morality:
- Harm / Care.
- Fairness / Reciprocity.
- In Group Loyalty. Only humans can form very large groups, which was a major step in enabling us to create civilization. Ants and termites also seem to do this.
- Authority / Respect.
- Purity / Sanctity. Sex on the right, food on the left.
- Liberty / Oppression - He added this one later, to try to understand the motivation of libertarians. They seem to focus on this one alone.
- The “liberals” or “progressives” work more from the values of harm / care and fairness / reciprocity, as well as liberty. Conservatives tend to use all 6 more equally. The big insight for me was to understand the fear that “order tends to decay”. I am usually on the progressive side – we need to move forward, to change, to adopt new technology and ideas. I tend to ignore the risk this carries. The basic conservative position tends to be that civilization is very fragile, and we could lose it all if we are not careful. They see order as precious, and anything that goes counter to the present structure is dangerous. Punishment also seems to be a key part of our moral motivation – as in religion and the threat of hell.
2. Talk about values, morals, principles.
Our gut, our irrational elephant is all about our morals, our values, our feelings. You need to be clear on what yours are, and speak to those all the time. Speak from your own values, to those of your audience. Emphasize the ones that the audience is likely to share. Speaking to a conservative audience, talk about your family, your patriotism, your respect for tradition and history. See the categories in rule #1.
You can certainly talk to care and fairness and liberty. But do not neglect the other values. For a simple example, climate change is a really huge problem. But most people are not able to get their heads around a problem that is 50 years down the road. Good research indicates that it is healthier to talk about the sacredness of nature and the environment, and the damage to God's creation. It is a "climate crisis" - not "global warming". Talk about the impact on their children and grandchildren from rising seas and expanding deserts. Understand they are
afraid of the problem. They would just like it to go away, and they are prone to like people who support that approach. They are not interested in more information about it.
Not Issue by Issue
People will vote against their own interests to defend their moral values. Debating the need for health care will not persuade them to change their fundamental value system. George Lakoff:
They're missing the idea that many Americans who depend on health care, affordable health care, for example, have strict-father positions and voted for Trump against their interests. And this is something has been known for ages, that a lot of poor conservatives vote against their material interests, because they're voting for their worldview. And the reason for it is that their moral worldview defines who they are. They are not going to vote against their own definition of who they are.
Speak to the Values you support
Take the example of the role of government. Many people want to limit government intervention, and they will vote for a candidate who speaks to that, even if that reduces government aid or programs on which they depend. It is not a rational argument - let that go. Frame the issue that the role of government is to provide needed services that are for the benefit of everyone: national defense, crime, courts, traffic management, highway construction, communications, education, food safety, health research, fair and honest markets. ALL of these things support business more than individuals. Without them, we would have no small businesses. Only international corporations could provide their own public infrastructure. Our "taxes" are better called "public investments". We do not have government "regulations" that stifle business, we have government "protections" that make business possible. Don't let the other side frame the language and the debate. But that takes some real work.
Respect the Opposition
It is clear that you must treat the people on the other side with respect. It serves no purpose to alienate them. To make that point strongly, I encourage you to spend a bit of time watching this movie,
Behind the Curve. It is a documentary on the "Flat Earth Society". Don't laugh! You can see the preview
here, and it is on Netflix. It is a fair and decent documentary. The producers take no stand on the issue, and they interview people well. The flat earth society participated as they clearly want their message to get to the general public. From
Wikipedia:
When director Clark was asked in an interview about the takeaway from the film he said, "my dream would be that when people watch it, they take flat Eartherism as an analogy to something they believe in, because it’s so easy to demonize another group or another person for something they think but you’re kind of just as guilty if you do that."[6]
These people are not crazy, they are not stupid. They have a strong religious belief. They fear a conspiracy theory that attacks that belief. They use scientific means to try to counter that story which threatens their belief system. It would behoove us all to calmly consider the beliefs that many of us hold with potentially even less evidence of support. It is clear that there is no point in arguing with these people, but do not treat them poorly either. We are all subject to the same kind of mental block for our beliefs.
I have been trying to come up with some analogies that would help explain how we work.
The Tiger in the Trail. When we were living on the savannah, and we came upon a tiger on the trail, our feet were moving before our brain even registered what we saw. That defensive mechanism is absolutely automatic.
Music When you hear a piece of music - your whole body responds to it - you know immediately whether you like it or not. There is no rational part of that. It has to do with the way your body works, you experiences, your emotions, your history. You cannot choose to respond differently. You can turn it off - you cannot stop its effect on you.
3. Ignore the other side.
Lakoff, George,
Don't Think of an Elephant!:
Quick! Don't think of an elephant" - and you did. You could not help yourself. When dealing with an opposing party or individual that is not amenable to rational discussion, your best approach is to just ignore their issues. If you repeat what they say, if you respond to what they say, if you argue with what they say, you are just increasing their exposure. Your comments will add to their stature. You will also drive home in the minds of their supporters how much they dislike you and disagree with you.
IGNORE the elephant in the room.
You need to know what the other side is about, but do not mention their name, or their ideas, or their proposals. Do not respond to them. I have never seen this done, but I would be tempted to ignore them even in a live debate where they were standing right there and talking. You can read a nice summary of how this works by the author
here. Democrats were very instrumental in getting the Republican candidate elected.
The Clinton campaign decided that the best way to defeat Trump was to use his own words against him. So they showed these clips of Trump saying outrageous things. Now what Trump was doing in those clips was saying out loud things that upset liberals, and that's exactly what his followers liked about him. So of course they were showing what actually was helping Trump with his supporters.
The other half is to know your own values, and then frame the conversation in your terms that relate to the audience - not their terms. That's a tough order, and a lot of work. Focus on the values from step 2 above. For example, don't assume that because someone speaks poorly of women or minorities, that this will raise opposition from those populations because of the value of fairness and equity. They may see other values as more important. The sacred, and respect for authority beats fairness every time. Issues like abortion, family stability, the role of the father figure dominate over a minor discomfort with language.
Take the issue of abortion for an example. If you are a "pro choice" person, then address the value of life, address the moral issues of children who are raised in poverty. Be more "pro life" than your opponent. Define a plan to reduce the number of abortions by providing support to single women who feel that they have no other choice. Work to make it rare and unneeded, not illegal. We all value the lives of children - speak to that. We do not need to criminalize a broadly accepted medical procedure in order to address the basic values at stake. At the same time, make it clear that we need to focus on our freedom from government oversight of religious values. That is one of our basic democratic principles. We would clearly resist any effort to support the punishment dictated by sharia law for
adultery. Interracial marriage in the U.S. was
illegal until 1967. How could it have taken that long for us to understand that?
Lakoff has many, many ideas on how to pursue this agenda of values and framing. You can get a good sense from this interview:
https://www.salon.com/2017/01/15/dont-think-of-a-rampaging-elephant-linguist-george-lakoff-explains-how-the-democrats-helped-elect-trump/
4. The little stuff matters - it's patterns all the way down.
Wish them well. This is wisdom from Kahneman and Haidt, and an MD from Mayo: Dr. Amit Sood. There is a lot of research on how people interact. Our fast brain scans faces all the time. It makes instant decisions on whether you are friend or foe, likable or not, trustworthy or not. If you wish someone well - sincerely, even without saying anything - it changes your face, your posture, your tone - everything about you will reflect that sentiment toward them. AND - their brain and body will respond in kind, before your slow brain is even aware of the change. Remember, this is not playacting. This is not manipulation. You must sincerely wish them well. It can even work over the phone - it changes the quality of your speech.
The next step is to build a trusting relationship - a bridging relationship, in the terms of Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay, authors of
How to have Impossible Conversations. This is a simplified explanation of how this works, but you should read the book to get the full program. The short hand one is from
Erik Barker. The genius part is, that unexpected kindness and respect works wonders.
- Be a Partner - not an Adversary. You are on their side. You want to understand them. If you can truly see it from their side, you will learn a great deal. Let go of winning. It is not a competition or a contest.
- Be nice, be respectful, sincere. Look for shared values, call those out, praise them.
- Focus on listening and understanding. Let go of arguing, of trying to change their thinking, or their behavior. Reflect back their ideas, and be positive about the underlying values which you share.
- Assume that their intentions are good an honorable, not devious and evil. They are doing what is best to protect their own world - do not get upset with that effort.
- Facts are the enemy, they persuade no one of emotional issues.
This is developed a bit more, with more of the research in this older blog post:
https://carlscheider.blogspot.com/2017/09/i-wish-you-well.html
5. Listen for feelings, and reflect them back - but only in one to one conversations.
A work in progress - check back or sign up for updates.
Other Research
Stuff I am working on.
- Post, Jerrold M.D., and Stephanie Doucette, Dangerous Charisma: The Political Psychology of Donald Trump and His Followers.
From the Amazon review: "Offering an in-depth psychological and political portrait of what makes Donald Trump tick, Dangerous Charisma combines psychoanalysis with an investigation into the personality of the current American president. This narrative not only examines the life and psychology of Donald Trump, but will also provide an analysis of the charismatic psychological tie between Trump and his supporters."
- Keim, Brandon, Primal Propensity for Disgust Shapes Political Positions, 10/21/2011,
https://www.wired.com/2011/10/disgust-and-politics/
It appears that some element of "conservatism" is deeply ingrained, beyond the conscious level, even based on our biology. Conservatives seem to be more fearful than progressives. So . . . another good reason not to castigate them and call them names - but to be empathic and listening to their concerns.
- Watching a man eat a handful of worms - viewers who self-identified as conservative, especially those opposing gay marriage, reacted with particularly deep disgust.
- The study "suggests that people's physiological predispositions help to shape their political orientations," wrote the researchers, who were led by University of Nebraska-Lincoln political scientists Kevin Smith and John Hibbing. "Disgust likely has an effect even without registering in conscious beliefs."
- Other researchers have found that conservatives seemingly tend to have a more rigid, structured cognitive style than liberals, who are more open to ambiguity; conservatives are also quicker to feel threatened.
- Disgust is especially interesting to researchers because it's such a fundamental sensation, an emotional building block so primal that feelings of moral repugnance originate in neurobiological processes shared with a repugnance for rotten food. In questionnaire-based studies, people prone to deep feelings of disgust tend to lean conservative.
- Keim, Brandon, Conservatives Scare More Easily Than Liberals, Say Scientists, 9/18/2008
https://www.wired.com/2008/09/fearmongering-h/
What Can We Do About This?
To this point, I have been exploring the research on the problem. The question always is - isn't there some way we can move humans beyond this gut reaction to complex problems? Our instant response worked well for simple things - avoiding the tiger, not eating bad food, choosing a cereal or a mate - but it does not work well for complex social problems, or scientific ones. Has all of this research uncovered any way to help individuals, and hopefully, all of us, to improve our decision making for the long haul?
Jonathan Haidt, our hero to this point, has started a program on political civility, which gives us some hope.
http://www.civilpolitics.org/
If you are aware of more efforts along these lines, let me know. Post below or send an email to carlscheider(at)hotmail.com.
