Drew Westen, PhD
Invited Address: Inside the Mind and Brain of the Voter: The Presidential
Campaign of 2008 (3346)
Saturday, August 16
3:00–3:50 p.m., Room 205B

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Drew Westen, professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at Emory University, and author of “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation” describes the influence of emotions in voting behavior.

Q: You’ve said that when reason and emotion collide, emotion invariably wins. Can you explain the science behind that statement?

A: Well, emotion invariably wins, or almost invariably wins, because if you think about the way our brains evolved—and about who we are as organisms for really millions of years—our ancestors relied on their gut and on feelings to pull them toward things that were good for them and their families, and away from things that were bad for them and their families based on the kinds of emotions that it generated. And that’s just as true with us. The only difference is we have some layers of cortex on top of more primitive structures that guide other organisms. Interestingly, it is true for both men and women that the best predictors of their voting behavior in order are:

• Their feelings towards the parties and their principles;
• Their feelings towards the candidates;
• The gut level feeling the candidates elicit from them;
• Their feelings towards the candidates personal attributes;
• And way down the list is their feelings towards the candidates policies.

Facts and figures about the candidates’ policies don’t actually even enter into the equation if you first hold constant all those different feelings that generate people’s votes. That’s based on about 40 years of data from the National Election Studies, which are large scale surveys of voting behavior and people’s attitudes.

Q: OK. So tell me about the validity of neuroscience in evaluating people’s reactions to politicians.

A: Well, the question about the validity of neuroscience in evaluating people’s reactions to politics is an interesting one, because a lot of people—and this is true actually in the advertising world as well because one of the things that my book “The Political Brain” generated was a good bit of interest among corporate marketing people as well, because they realized that the same people who buy Presidents buy toothpaste. You know, it’s the same brain that selects a president, that selects a spouse, that selects a product.

So with respect to Neuroscience in evaluating response to politicians, there’s a lot of hope out there for the sort of silver bullet that will tell you exactly what the voter is feeling when they hear a particular message, for example. And we’re not that far along yet in technologies like functional neuroimaging or brain scanning, simply because we don’t yet know the distinct neural signatures of particular emotions. In fact, there is a lot of academic debate about whether or not there is a distinct neural signature for every emotion. But there are methods that can pick up people’s emotional reactions and their specific associations to something they may not be aware of.

Q: So according to your research, who generates more emotion? McCain or Obama?

A: On the one hand it’s a partisan issue that Democrats tend to be more excited about Democratic candidates and Republicans by Republican candidates, but I think it’s probably fair to say that Obama has generated more emotion on both sides. Positive emotion for sure by Democrats and by many Independents, and McCain has generated less emotion by Republicans because he elicits mixed feelings from a lot of Republicans.

But Obama elicits pretty strong negative feelings from a lot of Republicans, so Obama sort of wins that question hands down, although it’s not always the emotions he would like to elicit.

Q: At this point, what does your research say about who has a better chance to win in November?

A: There’s not a lot of great research on this that anyone can point to, in part because of the limitations of polls when you have a black candidate, and the limitation is essentially with conscious self-report. My best guess is at this point is that if Obama succeeds in making the selection either a comparison of the two candidates and what their values are, and what their positions are, or simply makes it about the two of them, he’s the much more charismatic candidate and he would win. Or similarly, if he manages to make this a referendum on the Bush years and McCain’s voting record and its alignment with Bush about over 90 percent of the time, and McCain’s embracing Bush on a number of things during the Republican primaries, then I think he’ll win and win pretty handily.

If on the other hand, McCain succeeds in making this election a referendum on Barack Obama and his differentness, his middle name, his being “Not like ‘us,’” his “not really being American” his being “other,” if he succeeds in doing that, then I think he’ll probably win the election. So at this point I think a lot’s going to depend on which side does a better job of controlling whether people make this an election about Obama or about McCain and Bush.

During the conference, more than 3,000 symposia, paper and poster sessions are being presented. For more information, visit www.apa.org.

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