This Is Your Brain on Politics - NY Times op-ed

[groovedaddy]

This Is Your Brain on Politics - NY Times - Sunday, Nov. 11, 2007

IN anticipation of the 2008 presidential election, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to watch the brains of a group of swing voters as they responded to the leading presidential candidates. Our results reveal some voter impressions on which this election may well turn.

Our 20 subjects — registered voters who stated that they were open to choosing a candidate from either party next November — included 10 men and 10 women. In late summer, we asked them to answer a list of questions about their political preferences, then observed their brain activity for nearly an hour in the scanner at the Ahmanson Lovelace Brain Mapping Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. Afterward, each subject filled out a second questionnaire.

While in the scanner, the subjects viewed political pictures through a pair of special goggles; first a series of still photos of each candidate was presented in random order, then video excerpts from speeches. Then we showed them the set of still photos again. On the before and after questionnaires, subjects were asked to rate the candidates on the kind of 0-10 thermometer scale frequently used in polling, ranging from “very unfavorable” to “very favorable.”

We then compared the questionnaire responses with the brain data, and here’s what we found:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/opinion/11freedman.html?th&emc=th

[Oldenuff]

1. Must be

subscription only,but my guess is that they found out all of the 20 subjects fell asleep...probably had nightmares involving women in pantsuits too.

[ixion]

4. free registration...

:hi:

[Skinner]

2. "The two areas in the brain associated with anxiety and disgust — the amygdala and the insula —

were especially active when men viewed 'Republican.'"

LOL

[kilesimon]

3. NY TIMES

I personally like the SF chronical myself.

[frazzled]

5. I read this article yesterday and found it very interesting

and somewhat funny, too. The images of the brain scans made it fairly convincing, too.

What I found interesting was that it took self-avowed noncommitted voters ("swingers" who claim not to have a candidate or be either Republican or Democrat) and polled them in a traditional manner first--thus having a basis of "what they say" about the candidates to measure against the results of "what they think," based on brain scans done while watching the candidate videos.

Surprising results, but sometimes they made sense. The people who claimed to dislike Hillary had high activity for "conflicted" area of the brain while watching her video: meaning while they want to dislike her, they can't quite square that with watching her. That makes sense to me, because I have the same reaction to her at times. Those who claimed not to like Edwards had high activity in the "digust" center. That's quite interesting. Their dislike was heightened into something deeper on watching him. Bad sign for a general, where swing voters count a lot. And then there were the McCain and Obama viewers: they had little activity at all in the scans. I don't know if that's bad news (put them to sleep) or good (no intense feelings means room for acceptance). I'm surprised more of these kinds of studies haven't been done.

[Demeter]

6. One Step Up From Chicken Entrails

but interesting, in that horrifying scary-movie kind of way.

Reminds me of a classic sci-fi story by Asimov in which the entire national election is done by polling one person by personality testing or some other indirect method.
It's called "Franchise" (I LOVE Wikipedia!)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franchise_(Asimov)

"Franchise is a science fiction short story by Isaac Asimov. It first appeared in the August 1955 issue of the magazine If: Worlds of Science Fiction, and was reprinted in the collections Earth Is Room Enough (1957) and Robot Dreams (1986). It is one of a loosely connected series of stories concerning a fictional computer called Multivac. It is the first story in which Asimov dealt with computers as computers and not as immobile robots.

In the future, the United States has converted to an "electronic democracy" where the computer Multivac selects a single person to answer a number of questions. Multivac will then use the answers and other data to determine what the results of an election would be, avoiding the need for an actual election to be held.

The story centers around Norman Muller, the man chosen as "Voter of the Year" in 2008. At first he is not sure he wants the responsibility of representing the entire electorate, worrying that the result will be unfavorable and he will be blamed. However, after voting he is very proud that the citizens of the United States had, through him, "exercised once again their free, untrammeled franchise" - a statement that is somewhat ironic as the citizens didn't actually get to vote.

The idea of a computer predicting who the electorate would vote for instead of actually holding an election was probably inspired by the UNIVAC I's correct prediction of the result of the 1952 election."

[frazzled]

7. And yet better than polls

Just sayin'.

[Demeter]

8. That Remains to Be Seen

[rodeodance]

9. 2. Emotions about Hillary Clinton are mixed.

2. Emotions about Hillary Clinton are mixed. Voters who rated Mrs. Clinton unfavorably on their questionnaire appeared not entirely comfortable with their assessment. When viewing images of her, these voters exhibited significant activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, an emotional center of the brain that is aroused when a person feels compelled to act in two different ways but must choose one. It looked as if they were battling unacknowledged impulses to like Mrs. Clinton.

Subjects who rated her more favorably, in contrast, showed very little activity in this brain area when they viewed pictures of her.

This phenomenon, not found for any other candidate, suggests that Mrs. Clinton may be able to gather support from some swing voters who oppose her if she manages to soften their negative responses to her. But she may be vulnerable to attacks that seek to reinforce those negative associations.