Cognition and emotion in government and politics

Daniel S. Levine from the University of Texas at Arlington discusses the cognitive-emotional brain’s role in government and politics

In Western, especially Anglo-American, culture, we have developed over centuries a meme that laments that humans are often irrational and swayed by emotions. Emotions strongly influence both the policy decisions of political officeholders and the voting behaviour of ordinary citizens. This makes some of us shake our heads sadly and wonder if government will ever work constructively for the benefit of society.

Modern neuroscience tells a different, and potentially more hopeful, story. In the human brain, reason and emotion are not necessarily enemies. Rather, at best they are partners. The pathways for cognition and emotion are deeply interconnected. These functions involve both many parts of the cerebral cortex or outer surface of the brain, particularly the prefrontal cortex which is the seat of planning and executive function.

They also involve many areas below the cortex that we share with other animals, including the amygdala, which is necessary for emotional responses to events and the hypothalamus and midbrain, which are necessary for survival. Consequently, we are more aware of and attentive to environmental stimuli that evoke strong emotions in us. And every emotion we feel about a stimulus or an event is tied to a cognition that that stimulus or event will be good or bad for something we want to happen.

What lessons for government and politics can we draw from the close connections between cognition and emotion?

Drew Westen is an experimental psychologist at Emory University who has advised American candidates for office during their campaigns. Westen noted several examples of elections where one candidate was closer to the voters on policy viewpoints but lost the election. Most notable was the 2004 presidential race between John Kerry and George W. Bush. Kerry’s positions on healthcare and other social services appealed rationally to more low- to middle-income voters than did Bush’s, but Kerry could not connect with those voters on an emotional level. He came across as privileged or “not one of us,” saying he wanted to give back something to his country after the breaks he got. The Bush campaign attacked Kerry’s record in the Senate and the Vietnam War, and Kerry came across as weak for not responding to those attacks.

The 2004 election illustrates that, when dealing with voters, rational appeals based on policy need to be backed up by emotional appeals. Yet, as Westen points out, emotional appeals need not be based on fear, as they often are. Instead, they can be based on a positive appeal to our “better angels,” that is to values such as compassion and community. Since those values are universal, with the possible exception of a few sociopaths, positive appeals can, at best, unify across classes of society. In the United States, one of the best examples was Franklin Roosevelt and his “fireside chats,” which motivated all classes of people to come out of the Great Depression. In the United Kingdom, newly installed Prime Minister Andy Burnham has vowed to judge policies by their efficacy for regional communities who have felt neglected by the central government in London.

Dividing rather than uniting

Unfortunately, over the last decade, we have seen some educated people in the United States, the United Kingdom, Finland, and many other countries speak in ways that divide rather than unite. My book on reason and emotion argued that the Enlightenment meme of treating reason as separate from, and superior to, emotion encourages some groups in society to put down and feel superior to others.

This allows men to denigrate women, whites to denigrate people of color, and straight people to denigrate LGBTQ people, by labeling the other group as “too emotional.” More recently, a similar fate has befallen Brexit voters in the United Kingdom, opponents of the European Union (EU) in continental Europe, and Donald Trump voters in the United States. Those voters are, on average, less educated than those voting on the other side, and many of the more educated put them down as over-emotional, racist, and xenophobic. An example was 2016 U.S. Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton calling many of those likely to vote against her “a basket of deplorables,” which she later acknowledged was a campaign mistake.

While, of course, genuine racists exist in all countries, experimental psychologists in all countries have found that people with those sentiments more typically feel they are not being listened to. Deindustrialization has weakened communities and financial security in both Europe and the United States. The lack of hope encourages people to blame minorities whom they feel are getting more attention than they are and educated elites who are providing that attention to the minorities.

Hence, for any political movement to unite people around dealing effectively with the world’s major problems (climate change, inequality, war), it must acknowledge what attracts people to authoritarian leaders claiming to be populist. Then such a movement must compete with the faux-populists by co-opting the emotional pathways in the brains of potential voters. It will thereby gain the support of some people whom it would be tempted to dismiss as racist or otherwise deplorable.

What does neuroscience say about all this?

The work of many contemporary neuroscientists, notably Antonio Damasio at the University of Southern California, shows that effective decision- making requires healthy two-way connections between two specific brain regions: the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and the amygdala (Descartes’ Error, Grosset/Putnam, 1994). The OFC is a part of the frontal lobes specialized for emotional and social inputs, whereas the amygdala is the main area below the cortex for encoding the emotional significance of stimuli or events. The amygdala is also closely connected to the hippocampus, the main area for converting short-term memories into long-term memory.

The OFC has strong connections with other parts of the frontal lobes involved in thinking, planning, and memory retrieval, such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). These connections led Luiz Pessoa at the University of Maryland (The Cognitive- Emotional Brain, MIT Press, 2013) to conclude that no area of the brain should be thought of as either exclusively “cognitive” or exclusively “emotional.”

Westen’s admonition can thus be interpreted as saying that too many democratically inclined politicians have tried to deal mainly with the DLPFC and neglected the amygdala. In both the United States and Europe, it is encouraging that now an increasing number of younger politicians are seeking to reverse this neglect of emotions and to listen to, and address, the concerns of average people of all races and genders. They are driven both by the increasing inadequacies of the neoliberal world order and by the threat of that order promoting the dehumanizing aspects of artificial intelligence. For reasons explained in the book, I avoid explicit predictions, but believe that the challenges of the current world order are not insurmountable.

Looking ahead

My future contributions to this website will discuss more details of the scientific findings behind my conclusions. Those include results both in the neuroscience of cognition and emotion and in the experimental psychology of political behavior.