How the Brain Helps Partisans Admit No Gray

[woo me with science]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/30/AR2006073000579.html?sub=AR


By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 31, 2006; Page A02

In an experiment that pols may want to note closely, researchers recently plopped 10 Republicans and 10 Democrats into scanners that measure changes in brain-blood oxygenation....Each of the partisans was repeatedly shown images of President Bush and 2004 Democratic challenger John F. Kerry.

When Republicans saw Kerry (or Democrats saw Bush) there was increased activation in brain areas called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is near the temple, and the anterior cingulate cortex, which is in the middle of the head. Both these regions are involved in regulating emotions. (If you are eating an ice cream cone on a hot day and your ice cream falls on the sidewalk and you get upset, these areas of your brain remind you that it is only an ice cream, that not eating the ice cream can help keep those pounds off, and similar rationalizations.) More straightforwardly, Republicans and Democrats also showed activation in two other brain areas involved in negative emotion, the insula and the temporal pole. It makes perfect sense, of course, why partisans would feel negatively about the candidate they dislike, but what explains the activation of the cognitive regulatory system?

Turns out, rather than turning down their negative feelings as they might do with the fallen ice cream, partisans turn up their negative emotional response when they see a photo of the opposing candidate, said Jonas Kaplan, a psychologist at the University of California at Los Angeles.

In other words, without knowing it themselves, the partisans were jealously guarding against anything that might lower their antagonism. Turning up negative feelings, of course, is a good way to make sure your antagonism stays strong and healthy.

"My feeling is, in the political process, people come to decisions early on and then spend the rest of the time making themselves feel good about their decision," Kaplan said.

Although it seems paradoxical that people would want to make themselves feel poorly, Kaplan said partisans have a strong interest in feeling poorly about the candidate they are not going to vote for as that cements their belief that they are doing the right thing.

More at link...

-------------------------------------------
EDIT: COPYRIGHT. PLEASE POST ONLY 4 OR 5
PARAGRAPHS FROM THE COPYRIGHTED NEWS SOURCE
PER DU RULES.

[Marie26]

1. Interesting! nt

[mcscajun]

2. This was written up earlier this year, and it answers the question

Why can't we get THROUGH to (Fill in the blank with whomever you don't agree with)?

They really AREN'T listening. And neither are we, when they try to reach out to us.

[Igel]

3. Yes.

It essentially means that we wind up with different sets of facts.

There's another bit of info. When you read or listen to something, in the following 10 seconds or so you discard the words you heard. You remember the content; frequently, and even usually, you remember the content well enough that when you go to regurgitate the content verbally you recreate the original utterance. So it sounds like you remembered the words. You didn't. You remembered the content.

Put the two together: You read something by somebody you dislike, a partisan filter imposes an interpretation on what's said. Then, when you go back, you misquote or misremember the content, since the actual words weren't retained.

Many large-scale political fights would be avoided, and possible discussions could occur, if not for these two things. I've gotten in arguments on DU over quotes where the other people don't care about transcripts: they heard it differently, and no amount of transcripts or recordings will change their mind. (I had a boss like that, too, but he was a fundamentalist minister.)

[mcscajun]

4. I had to learn this the hard way at another forum in 2004.

During the run-up to the 2004 election, I was engaged on another forum talking to pro-Bush types who would attack Clark, or Dean, or Kerry, and Always Clinton and Gore, even though neither was part of the election. No matter how well I marshalled my facts or approached the issue under discussion from a purely rational perspective, I was met with stonewalls nearly every time. I kept at it though, in the hopes of reaching even ONE Voter to change their mind. I'll never know if I did or not, but after the election, I wandered away from that site, with one lesson learned.

You're right about it here, too. There are many who cannot be swayed by facts they do not believe. The RW has not cornered that particular market.