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The Political Brain

Author	Drew Westen
Country	United States
Language	English
Subject	Psychology
Genre	Non-fiction
Publisher	Public Affairs
Publication date	2007
Media type	Print (hardcover, paperback)

The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation is a book published in 2007 by Drew Westen, a Professor in Psychology and Psychiatry.

The book outlines scientific explanations of the central role of emotion in determining political leaning and election outcomes and provides principles for running an emotionally compelling campaign. Westen ascribes Democratic Party's missed opportunity of electoral wins in the last 5 decades to a misunderstanding of how the mind works and how people vote; and to a failure to shape compelling and coherent narratives for the party and its candidates.

Key Themes[edit]

Empirical and Scientific Explanation of How the Mind Works:

The book's central thesis is an objection of the theory of "dispassionate mind"^[1] - an irrational emotional commitment to rationality that assumes we make decisions by weighing the evidence and reasoning to the most valid conclusions - bears no relation when it comes to political decisions.

People make decisions based on emotion-driven thinking. Empirically, Westen demonstrated through magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) experiments that when partisans face threatening information to their personal identification and political affiliation, they are more likely to carry out a "self-serving reasoning" to reach emotionally biased conclusions. Westen then extends this finding to many observations in political campaigns, such as candidate appeal to voters through the subliminal negative effect of the "RATS ad" run by the Bush campaign in 2000, where "RATS" appeared for a fraction of a second while the narrator uttered "bureaucrats"; the negative campaigns such as the "Daisy ad" run by the Johnson campaign; more even more manipulatively and hard-to-defeat, the "Willie Horton add" that capitalizes on spreading activation and racial prejudice towards African Americans. Westen thoroughly demonstrates that an effective campaign ad must appeal to strong emotional association because the neural circuits activated during complex human decision making do not function independently of the emotional systems. The choice of words, images, sounds, music, backdrop, tone of voice, and a host of other factors are likely to be as significant to the electoral success of a campaign as its content.

Contrary to rational decision models - rooted in the belief shared by Plato and Federalist Papers that democracy is built upon the basis of reasoning - in reality, the population generally lacks the expertise or capacity to gather all available information and know what is truly gong on. Therefore, messages that only appeal to the brain are not activating the part of the brain that actually makes the decisions for us. Electorate do not make decisions based on data (cognitive constraints) alone. They also care about how these decisions make us feel (emotional constraints). In fact, using only emotional constrains - how people feel about an issue or a candidate - Westen was able to predict people's judgement with higher than 85% accuracy rate. An election is therefore not a marketplace of ideas but a marketplace of emotion.

However, this is not to say that facts or candidate's stance on an issue are not important. They are important to the extent that they appeal to the electorate's interests and values and evoke positive emotion towards the candidate and the party. Also, when people ultimately fail to justify their pre-exiting beliefs in the face of overwhelming facts, adaptive emotional process kicks in and opinions change, as they did regarding the Vietnam War when death toll kept rising.

Hierarchy of Goals of a Campaign:
Westen argues that emotions are far more powerful determinants than specific issues and policies when people are casting ballots in the booth. Policies and issues effect voters through the emotions they engender. He urges Democratic strategists to adopt the hierarchy of goal that should guide every campaign:

Define the party and its principles that have a emotionally compelling narrative and a coherent story, and define the other party and its values in ways that undermine its capacity to resonate emotionally with voters.

Maximize positive and minimize negative feelings towards its candidates.
Manage feelings toward the candidates' personal characteristics.
Manage positive and negative feelings towards the candidates' policies and positions.

Westen criticized the approach of letting poll results dictate policy stance, which he calls the "trickle-up" policies, essentially starting from the bottom of the campaign goal hierarchy, assuming that voters assess individual policies, additively create an overall expected utility, and choose a candidate accordingly.

Weston suggests that poll results should not be used as a one dimensional issue ranking, instead, it should be used as a three dimensional map of the emotional landscape that reveals the ranking of emotional relevant of principles.

Practical Implication of Political Campaigns:
Westen’s believes that the Democrats campaigns have not been as effective as they can be in the past 40 decades because, unlike the Republicans, they have been misled by a fundamentally flawed model of the dispassionate mind, which overvalues rational appeals to the voter, and fails to make the emotional connection that allows the Democrats to create their narratives and convey their values.

Westen’s message is a wake-up call to Democratic candidates and strategists. The first and most central task of any campaign is to create a compelling political narrative. However, for years, Democrats have been running campaign that lack a master narrative and emotional constitution, deliberately shun away from attacking opponent's narrative/value in fear of voters disliking "negativity", leave a void for their opponent to define their narrative for them, and was ineffective in defining opponent's narrative. On the other hand, Republicans offered a clear and compelling master narrative. The story of the conservatism is the only well-defined narrative in the public domain. The story of liberalism is not only ceded into fragmented policies, it's been contaminated by the branding of the right that people are not sure if they want to be associated with it anymore. Furthermore, Westen argues that when Republican candidates launched irresponsible and bigoted smear campaigns, Democrats acted slowly and rationalize their passivity as “rising above” the attack. Such passivity however, was often interpreted by voters as cowardly - they went on to lose the campaign. When the Republican asserts an extreme principle, such as "abortion is murder", instead of shunning away from such controversial issues, the Democrat should fight back with a compelling counter narrative. The specific issues the candidate choose to take on should be consistent with the party's master narratives. They should also vary by candidate and region.