I was listening to a couple of buddies talk about the Republican debates the other day: each of them asserting their candidate of choice had “won” the day. When I mentioned that the focus groups after the debates had all chosen a candidate other than the two they were advocating, they both simultaneously said, “Idiots!”
I recently read a study about how, during the 2004 elections (Kerry v Bush), some researchers at Emory University used functional magnetic resonance imaging brain scans (fMRI) on 30 voters: 15 committed Democrats, 15 committed Republicans. While viewing multiple instances where their candidate of choice had contradicted himself, the researchers monitored the 30 brains. (The Secret Language of Leadership, Stephen Denning)
And what did the men and women at Emory discover?
While the viewers watched and listened to the self-contradictory statements of their candidate, that part of the brain where we reason – was inactive! And what part of the brain was active? The emotional circuits were all firing away.
People pretty much hear what they want to hear. I like you, so I am going to constantly place what you do and say in a particular frame. You weren’t contradicting yourself: you were adding a nuance to a previous statement. You weren’t staking out an entirely different position than previously taken, you were merely reframing the same position you had always held to for a different segment of the voters.
Psychologists call this confirmation bias.
A few weeks ago I read another study where the participants would answer a questionnaire dealing with the various issues being debated during the primaries. Their answers would then be tabulated and, insto-presto, the candidate’s name that most accurately represented the questionnaire’s positions would be given. Only problem was that in many cases it did not jibe with the candidate the participant had already chosen.
Obviously this presents a major challenge for the Presidential candidates. How do they get past people’s biases? Obviously the answer is not merely to make a more rational argument regarding their positions, as people are not thinking their way to a candidate as much as they are feeling their way. What they should do, then, is add an emotional component to the rationale given for their positions. And how do they do this? One way is to tell stories that incarnate the rationale of their positions.
However, what about us voters? What about our confirmation biases? At the very least, I think we must become more self-aware. If we know we have them—if we refuse to adopt the position that we are above such biases—we can become a bit more skeptical about how we arrive at our decisions, and, therefore, dig a little deeper, think a bit more, about our candidate’s shortcomings, and their candidate’s strong points.
Copyright, 2008, Monte E Wilson
