This Is Your Brain on Hillary: Political Neuroscience Hits New Low in New York Times
This Is Your Brain on Hillary: Political Neuroscience Hits New Low in New York Times
November 12, 2007
By Brandon Keim
Brain scans of swing voters shown pictures of Mitt Romney reveal activity in the amygdala, an area associated with anxiety. John Edwards elicits disgust; Hillary Clinton, conflict. People feel connected to Fred Thompson, but don't feel much of anything about Barack Obama or John McCain.
Those are the quick-and-dirty takeaways from an experiment conducted by a group of neuroscientists and policy wonks and described in the Op-Ed section of Sunday's New York Times. Look past the surface, though, and this attempt to connect politics and brain science becomes practically meaningless.
In the experiment, UCLA neuroscientists hooked up 10 men and 10 women to, all self-described swing voters who cared more about individual candidates than party affiliation, to fMRI machines. The voters were asked to rate their predisposition towards the candidates on a scale of 1 to 10. Then they were shown still images of the candidates, short clips of campaign speeches, and more still images. At each stage, the researchers measured the intensity and location of neural activity accompanying the stimuli, then made composite averages of the measurements.
Their observations, based on these composites, at first seem interesting. On average, women started out feeling favorable about Hillary Clinton but cooled down after watching her speak; men exhibited the same reaction to Rudy Giuliani. Mitt Romney evoked more neural activity than any other candidate. Fred Thompson stimulated empathy-associated structures, as did John Edwards -- but subjects who didn't like Edwards really didn't like him; their brains showed disgust.
Let's look closer, though, at the response to Edwards. When looking at still pictures of him, "subjects who had rated him low on the thermometer scale showed activity in the insula, an area associated with disgust and other negative feelings." How many people started out with a low regard for Edwards? We aren't told. Maybe it was everybody, in which case the findings might conceivably be extrapolated to the swing voter population of the United States. But maybe it was just five or ten voters, of whom one or two had such strong feelings of disgust that it skewed the average. What about the photographs? Was he sweating and caught in flashbulb glare that would make anyone's picture look disgusting? How did the disgust felt towards Edwards compare to that felt towards other candidates? How well do scientists understand the insula's role in disgust -- better, I hope, than they understand the Romney-activated amygdala, which is indeed associated with anxiety, but also with reward and general feelings of arousal?
These criticisms hold for just about every observation the researchers made. The sample size is miniscule, the science involved ambiguous, and the observations as open-ended as the race itself. But all that might have been tolerable if participants had been observed as they compared the candidates' proposals and positions. Instead, we get superficial, quasi-scientific observations perfectly suited to the intellectually barren, soundbite-driven reality of our nation's Presidential politics.
Who knows, maybe the NYT's Op-Ed editor and the researchers are just realists who understand that, like it or not, Presidential politics are shallow and cynical. Maybe it was all some sort of clever meta-commentary: a neuroscientific mirror intentionally designed to reflect our flawed electoral culture. But I doubt it. If you want to learn about voters, skip the fMRIs and talk to some. A lunch hour's worth of conversation is bound to provide more insight.
But it's not like the op-ed was a total waste of time. I now know that the sensations I experienced upon finishing were related to activity in my insula.
http://tinyurl.com/yqtzzt
November 12, 2007
By Brandon Keim
Brain scans of swing voters shown pictures of Mitt Romney reveal activity in the amygdala, an area associated with anxiety. John Edwards elicits disgust; Hillary Clinton, conflict. People feel connected to Fred Thompson, but don't feel much of anything about Barack Obama or John McCain.
Those are the quick-and-dirty takeaways from an experiment conducted by a group of neuroscientists and policy wonks and described in the Op-Ed section of Sunday's New York Times. Look past the surface, though, and this attempt to connect politics and brain science becomes practically meaningless.
In the experiment, UCLA neuroscientists hooked up 10 men and 10 women to, all self-described swing voters who cared more about individual candidates than party affiliation, to fMRI machines. The voters were asked to rate their predisposition towards the candidates on a scale of 1 to 10. Then they were shown still images of the candidates, short clips of campaign speeches, and more still images. At each stage, the researchers measured the intensity and location of neural activity accompanying the stimuli, then made composite averages of the measurements.
Their observations, based on these composites, at first seem interesting. On average, women started out feeling favorable about Hillary Clinton but cooled down after watching her speak; men exhibited the same reaction to Rudy Giuliani. Mitt Romney evoked more neural activity than any other candidate. Fred Thompson stimulated empathy-associated structures, as did John Edwards -- but subjects who didn't like Edwards really didn't like him; their brains showed disgust.
Let's look closer, though, at the response to Edwards. When looking at still pictures of him, "subjects who had rated him low on the thermometer scale showed activity in the insula, an area associated with disgust and other negative feelings." How many people started out with a low regard for Edwards? We aren't told. Maybe it was everybody, in which case the findings might conceivably be extrapolated to the swing voter population of the United States. But maybe it was just five or ten voters, of whom one or two had such strong feelings of disgust that it skewed the average. What about the photographs? Was he sweating and caught in flashbulb glare that would make anyone's picture look disgusting? How did the disgust felt towards Edwards compare to that felt towards other candidates? How well do scientists understand the insula's role in disgust -- better, I hope, than they understand the Romney-activated amygdala, which is indeed associated with anxiety, but also with reward and general feelings of arousal?
These criticisms hold for just about every observation the researchers made. The sample size is miniscule, the science involved ambiguous, and the observations as open-ended as the race itself. But all that might have been tolerable if participants had been observed as they compared the candidates' proposals and positions. Instead, we get superficial, quasi-scientific observations perfectly suited to the intellectually barren, soundbite-driven reality of our nation's Presidential politics.
Who knows, maybe the NYT's Op-Ed editor and the researchers are just realists who understand that, like it or not, Presidential politics are shallow and cynical. Maybe it was all some sort of clever meta-commentary: a neuroscientific mirror intentionally designed to reflect our flawed electoral culture. But I doubt it. If you want to learn about voters, skip the fMRIs and talk to some. A lunch hour's worth of conversation is bound to provide more insight.
But it's not like the op-ed was a total waste of time. I now know that the sensations I experienced upon finishing were related to activity in my insula.
http://tinyurl.com/yqtzzt
bin66 - 15. Nov, 00:38
