Four Sides of the Same Coin
By Daniel O'Connor of Integral Ventures, LLC
By now, most of us have heard about the results of a recent study in which avowed Democrats and Republicans systematically ignored facts, by-passed reasoning, and emotionally rationalized their foregone conclusions regarding candidates from each party. According to this LiveScience story, Democrats and Republicans Both Adept at Ignoring the Facts:
Democrats and Republicans alike are adept at making decisions without letting the facts get in the way, a new study shows. And they get quite a rush from ignoring information that's contrary to their point of view. Researchers asked staunch party members from both sides to evaluate information that threatened their preferred candidate prior to the 2004 Presidential election. The subjects' brains were monitored while they pondered.
"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."
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. Then, with their minds made up, brain activity ceased in the areas that deal with negative emotions such as disgust. But activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix, Westen explained.
The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making. "None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged," Westen said. "Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones." Notably absent were any increases in activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most associated with reasoning.
We saw similar results last year, as reported in this BusinessWeek article, from researchers examining the way people make decisions in time:
One of the most fruitful avenues of neuro research is "time inconsistency." When people decide about the distant future, they're roughly as rational as economic textbooks assume. But when faced with a choice of whether to consume something now or delay gratification, they can be as impulsive as chimps. Harvard's Laibson coined "quasi-hyperbolic discounting" to describe the behavior, but that was just a label, not an explanation.
So Laibson and others scanned people inside MRI machines and discovered two parts of the brain operating in radically different ways. For decisions about the far-off future, the prefrontal cortex takes a long-term perspective. But for decisions such as whether to buy another chocolate bar right now, the limbic system takes over and demands immediate gratification.
In The Neuroeconomics of Time, I suggested that this time-inconsistency might be a factor in the temporal structure of our economy by way of the theory of time preference, which may be thought of as the subjective origin of interest rates. Interest rates, of course, "play an axial role in everything from money supply to wealth distribution to debt accumulation to business cycles to ecological sustainability. Our preference for, and perception of, value over time is certainly one of the most important factors in the evolution of the market economy. It gave rise to our multi-tiered technological capital structure, it governs our natural resource management in relation to the temporal rhythms of our natural systems, and it shapes our social relations on a daily basis in ways we cannot easily discern."
In another study, this one focused on the way people decide how to distribute a small gift, researchers reported that people used a combination of reason and emotion that was related to their judgment regarding fairness:
In their study, the Princeton researchers asked people to play the ultimatum game while the receiver's brain was scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a technology that allows researchers to see what brain areas are active at all moments during the study. They found that the more unfair the offer, the more activity they saw in an area called the anterior insula, which is associated with disgust and other negative emotions.
Another brain area, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is associated with working memory and deliberative thought, also responded to unfair offers. When the researchers averaged the results from 19 subjects, who each played 10 rounds of the game with different proposers, they found that the activity of the emotion area exceeded that of the deliberative area in cases when the subjects rejected the offers. The reverse was true when they accepted offers.
"It is not only telling us that there is an emotional response but that there seems to be a competition between these different considerations or ways of processing the situation," said Jonathan Cohen, who directs Princeton's Center for the Study of Brain, Mind and Behavior and is a co-author of the study.
In The Neuroeconomics of Fairness, I asked what they would find if they performed fMRIs on the proposers as well. "Would they find elevated activity in the anterior insula--associated with disgust and other negative emotions--when the proposers were acting at their greediest? Surely there is some disdain, if not outright disgust, in the mind of any person who makes an extremely unfair offer to another person as if this other person deserves no better consideration."
Where am I going with this?
Well, the combination of these three studies, not to mention countless others, suggests that there may be a psychological/neurological link between time-inconsistency, fairness, greed, and political decision making, with the most politically opinionated citizens from the Left and the Right tending to make their decisions on the basis of short-term, self-interested, emotionally-governed rationalizations consistent with their long-held preconceptions about what is fair, good, or normatively appropriate.
Furthermore, there is no reason why we should assume that the politicians themselves have transcended the short-term, self-interested, emotionally-governed rationalizations of their political bases. While politicians would never agree to be tested in a laboratory, researchers might like to analyze their campaign speeches, advertisements, and debates for signs of over-active limbic systems. (Hint: Watch for movement in their lips.) Actually, this would explain much of the public policy, including the economic policy, emanating from the Republican-Democrat MAD-house in Washington.
Finally, we might also find a linkage that extends to the media, whose partisan pundits and fact-agnostic managing editors have long ago realized that truth-seeking doesn't matter nearly as much as the ratings they can get by appealing to the least common denominator of proto-human psychology/neurology.
As we weave together these and many other strands of logic, it becomes increasingly clear that the co-arising psychological and neurological roots of our individual value functions manifest in what I have alternately described as a crisis of vision between the economic sub-cultures of libertarians, egalitarians, and authoritarians and the stable instability of our economic system. Think of them as four sides of the same coin.
© 2006 by Daniel J. O'Connor. All Rights Reserved.
See Also:
Do economists really need brain science to know that voting is not very rational? With the opportunity cost of just voting, let alone studying the issues, exceeding the expected benefit, it is irrational to take voting seriously.
This old truth leads us back to Winston Churchill. Democracy is a terrible system of government, but the others are worse.
Posted by: Dan Landau | March 15, 2006 at 11:00 AM
>
Probably not. But many non-economists and those who do not take psychology seriously might very well appreciate a neurological explanation for the irrational behavior they see in others (never themselves, of course).
But then, come to think of it, many economists cling so tightly to their own pseudo-positivist assumptions of rational choice behavior that they might really need to see a slide deck of colorful brain scans before they'll acknowledge the possibility of systematic irrationality.
Posted by: Daniel O'Connor | August 02, 2006 at 07:15 PM