Tests show political thinking is emotional

From the New York Times via the Houston Chronicle:

Liberals and conservatives can become equally bug-eyed and irrational when talking politics, especially when they are on the defensive.

Using MRI scanners, neuroscientists have now tracked what happens in the politically partisan brain when it tries to digest damning facts about favored candidates or criticisms of them.

The process is almost entirely emotional and unconscious, the researchers report, and there are flares of activity in the brain's pleasure centers when unwelcome information is being rejected.

Click here for the rest.

Of course, anybody with half a brain already knows this, but it's nice that there is now some solid scientific evidence to prove it. As the article observes, it doesn't absolutely have to be this way, but it takes a truly intellectually disciplined individual to overcome emotional bias. Lord knows, I try, but I'm quite certain that I'm very much at the mercy of my own physical nature, that is, my brain, just as everybody else is--I feel like I'm maybe a step ahead of most people if only because I've had some really fun conversations about politics with the polite conservatives I've known over the years; maybe my high school debate days sent me down a path that affords me a bit more cold rationality when considering political questions. Or maybe I'm just fooling myself. I don't know.

I do know that the schools could do far more in the way of training people to rationally deal with controversial issues. But then that's not what the schools are really about, after all.

But this knowledge, that people are extraordinarly emotional about politics, brings me back to a question I've asked here a few times before: given the loud and abusive rhetoric coming down from the right wing these past couple of decades, given that such rhetoric seems to be wildly effective when it comes to results, shouldn't the left attempt to emulate this approach? Shouldn't the left abandon the "moral high ground" of civilized debate just as the right has done? This study shows that anybody who tries to be fair, who tries to persuade with facts and calm argumentation, is at a distinct competitive disadvantage when debating those who rely heavily on emotional appeals in order to win. In other words, it seems to me that the left, although this is changing to some extent, continues to brings knives to the proverbial gun fight. Now that we know for sure how utterly devastating emotionally based arguments can be, I'm very tempted to give into this approach to politics.

Hell, I give into it here at Real Art at least once a week already. Should I go further?

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