Research pwns politics

Asking participants to deliberate and make a good judgment dramatically increased the response times and reduced the predictive accuracy of judgments relative to both judgments made after 250 ms of exposure to the faces and judgments made within a response deadline of 2 s.

Researchers asked staunch party members from both sides to evaluate information that threatened their preferred candidate prior to the 2004 Presidential election.
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"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."
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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.

SockPuppet said:
Hm. I'd like to see some results from other countries, please.

But it makes sense, to everyone except the far right:

parties evolve to fit their audience's easiest approval mechanism.

Priapos said:
Researchers showed students photos of candidates in a very well designed study (abstract). Based on their choices from the photos alone, they predicted the outcomes of the elections with about 70% accuracy.

Jennifer_ said:

If people vote based on appearance, then how do you explain Anne Widdecombe and John Prescott? Hmm...

We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning

Priapos said:

Results from other countries would interest me as well, especially countries with a less media-centric culture. I doubt that the UK results would differ from the US, but you never know until you do the experiment.

I don't quite get the second comment; I could read it several ways.

Sort of a feedback loop of shallowness?

SockPuppet said:

Partly a little snark at the "intelligent design" crew; partly a simple description of what's happening. If it's possible to get audience (= voter) approval while avoiding them thinking, is it surprising that successful parties find candidates who will do just that?

mercurius said:

I'm tempted to think that its not so much surprising as inevitable.