Mind Control or Marketing
If you were asked to judge a policy proposal for addressing a social issue, which would be more important to you, the content of the proposal or the party that wrote it?
Most of us would answer that the specific policies would be much more important than the political party that proposed it. Most of us would be dead wrong.
Political marketers know that they have to target swing voters (undecideds, independents, etc.) with their ads and other efforts because trying to change the mind of committed party members is next to impossible.
In The Neuroscience of Political Marketing, I described research by Drew Westen at Emory that showed political messages were processed primarily in an emotional, not rational, way.
A study by social psychologist Geoffrey Cohen at Yale shows that cognitive dissonance plays a big role in the way people evaluate political issues, and that they will adjust their beliefs (and maybe facts) as needed to resolve that dissonance.
Cohen’s experiment was simple. He organized two groups of subjects, one composed of liberal Democrats, the other of conservative Republicans.
Then, he showed them very different proposals on the topic of welfare.
One policy proposal was very liberal, and involved large expenditures of tax money. The other was harshly conservative, and proposed far lower levels of assistance and expense.
As you might expect, the liberal subjects preferred the free-spending plan while the conservatives liked the restrictive plan.
Here’s the bizarre twist: when the subjects were told that the plan they didn’t like had been proposed by their own party, their attitudes changed and they favored the plan they had initially opposed.
Liberals thought that cracking down on welfare was a good idea, while conservatives found they could justify opening the coffers for this important social purpose. They even wrote essays explaining why the policy they now favored was appropriate.
And, as Neuromarketing readers could anticipate, the subjects were unaware of this influence.
They did think that other people were influenced by party beliefs, but considered their own decision-making to be rational and not tainted by politics.
This is another example of why getting votes from opposing party members is so difficult. One’s political affiliation can trump everything, including logic and common sense.
Any experienced political campaign manager will tell you that the swing voters – those individuals who don’t have a strong party commitment – are the ones the candidate has to convince.
This may seem obvious – it’s clearly going to be easier to sway a fairly undecided and uncommitted voter than one that has voted a straight party ticket for the opposition for the last twenty years.
As it turns out, there’s a growing body of neuroscience research that supports the policy of ignoring the committed base of both parties (except, of course for “get out the vote” efforts for those favorable to the candidate).
In late January, Drew Westen of Emory University announced the results of a brain scan study of how political messages are viewed by partisan voters.
“We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning,” said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University. “What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts.”
The test subjects on both sides of the political aisle reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted, Westen and his colleagues say.
Then, with their minds made up, brain activity ceased in the areas that deal with negative emotions such as disgust. But activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix, Westen explained.
***The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making.***
While people not behaving rationally when making voting decisions is hardly “stop the presses” news, the study really points up the near futility of persuading partisan voters with even the most logical appeals.
It also explains why sometimes seemingly corrupt politicians get re-elected in some areas.
While voters outside the area may shake their head in wonder, what is likely happening is that all of the facts are being processed emotionally by many voters. Negative information is downgraded or discarded, while the candidate’s own explanations are reinforced.
“The result is that partisan beliefs are calcified, and the person can learn very little from new data,”
This raise major questions as to the effectiveness of political marketing.
Are the billions spent on a news coverage, editorializing, political advertising, etc. all dollars down the drain?
Indeed, in Is This Column Futile, Dick Meyer of CBSNews.com makes that point…market research tends to suggest that anyone reading these words right now is more politically engaged than most.
So to the extent this column tries to point out contradictions, dishonesty and hogwash in politics and rhetoric, it is probably a waste of time.
I am, it appears, hitting my ventromedial prefrontal cortex against the wall.
The truth is that political advertising DOES sometimes work, and even editorial writers can have an impact. The people who won’t be affected are the most partisan extremes, but there are plenty of voters in the middle who still process information in a rational, or at least partially rational, manner. Time and time again, negative campaigning has been shown to be effective.
While some of the appeal of negative ads is emotional, much of the content is presented as factual information: “My opponent accepted campaign money from crooks… She voted to increase taxes… He was absent for many important votes.”
Truly partisan voters won’t be affected in the least.
Anything short of FBI video showing the candidate taking bribes will be dismisses as opposition rhetoric without any critical thinking involved.
Voters closer to the middle, though, will process this information in at least a partially rational manner (including, of course, judging the credibility of any claims), and may be swayed in one direction or the other.
Westen’s findings won’t affect campaign strategies in the least, inasmuch as they more or less confirm what political pros have known all along.
I think the publicity WILL awaken a few political types to the potential input of neuromarketing.
If you are running a national campaign, either for a presidential candidate or a political advocacy group, wouldn’t you spend a little to strap some independent voters into an fMRI scanner and see which of your commercials light up different parts of their brain?
Of course, just like commercial ads, making the linkage between observed brain activity and ultimate behavior (in this case, in the voting booth) may still be a bit tenuous. Still, I’d be surprised if both parties and some of the bigger advocacy groups weren’t already running some tests or at least planning to do so.