The Political Brain: Q&A with Drew Westen, author of “The Political Brain"

The Role of Emotions in Voters’ Political Decisions

For the past three decades the Republican Party and the conservative movement have mastered the political game of controlling the narrative—the story and basic ideas of politics and governance—giving them competitive edge in dominating the national political scene. When you think of the GOP you automatically know its “brand.” Republicans seem to intuitively know how to construct and frame issues that go to the gut of the voter. Meanwhile the Democrats, placing policies before emotions, have lost elections and have had themselves framed as losers and weak on national security; in other words, they have led themselves to be branded by their opponents.

Contrary to what some Democratic politicos think, Drew Westen, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at Emory University, as well as a neuroscientist and political psychologist, argues in his book The Political Brain (Public Affairs, 2007), that emotions may well play a greater role in dictating how voters approach politicians and issues.

While Thomas Frank’s 2004 book What’s the Matter with Kansas? may have outlined how voters have been “duped” into voting against their own interests, Westen argues that this may well be possible because voters don’t feel that someone is looking out for the interests and values that give their lives meaning.

After several stops and starts in trying to conduct this interview, I spoke to him over the phone while he was in Washington, D.C.

Norman Kelley: Is it fair to say that your book, The Political Brain, makes an argument that humans are more structurally geared towards an emotional appeal first rather than an intellectual or rational one?

Drew Westen: In the broadest strokes yes. But although the real message of the book is that reason and emotion evolved together. We and other animals have been driven by emotional processes that we have had a lot longer, and that the quality that we like to extol and call reason. The best politicians understand that the strongest arguments you make are emotional arguments, which wedge information into a message that is emotionally evocative, compelling and draws people attention.

NK: Is it then fair to say that human beings are instinctually geared towards the gut reaction more so than a rational or intellectual reaction?

DW: We tend to have a gut level reaction first and a considered rational reaction only if that gut level reaction doesn’t solve the problem for us.

NK: So therefore that old saying “Trust your instincts…?”

DW: Yes. Most of the time our gut level reactions lead us in the right direction. If you think about how they evolved, when humans were evolving it wouldn’t be very helpful to stop, study the structure of the snake carefully and then decide whether or not to run from it, to catch a quick image of it and take off. Now, that’s not always the best way to make decisions, but if you think about how we make decisions. If you think about how we make the most important decisions in our lives, how to choose a spouse, by calculating the cost and benefit of a potential spouse’s attributes and then weighing them and comparing them to other potential spouse; we have a gut level judgment based on chemistry. Is this the kind of person I want to be married to? That’s how we really make our judgments in politics.

NK: Is the brain structured in such a way to [accept] an emotional [appeal] rather than a rational argument?

DW: Yes. I think it is fair to say that we tend to have rapid emotional responses before we have considered reasoned one, and that we also have value-based responses that are often quite well considered, but eventually become automatic so that we hear certain words, or images or metaphors, we know that this person is with us, that this person shares our values, and we respond to that immediately, to that emotionally.

This is where Republicans and conservatives have been much more successful than Democrats and progressives. They have branded a series of phrases, ideas, and narratives that are emotionally evocative, and that cues people right way that they are attentive to certain concerns.

I was listening, in 2006, to an exchange between a Democratic congressman and a Republican congresswoman on MSNBC about what Democrats and Republicans would do about taxes. And the Democrat was giving an answer—and he seemed like an affable guy—by signaling with his hands that something was going up and something was going down, I think subsidies. By the end of it I wasn’t sure what he said or exactly what he meant, but as a Democrat I wanted to think that I liked it.

The Republican then came on and said, “The difference between us is that they see this as a revenue stream. We see this as your paycheck.” And I remember thinking at the time that this wasn’t a fair fight. She [the Republican] wasn’t making this stuff up on the fly; she was well prepared not just with arguments, because it wasn’t an argument she was making, but what she was saying to people was, “ I understand that you work hard for your money, and I’m not going to take it away unless I got a really good reason for it.”

The Democrat wasn’t armed with some equally compelling on the other side. What the Democrat didn’t have was a crisp and emotionally compelling way to talk about the Democratic stand on taxes is. There was no mention…uh…Something as simple as…

NK: I can give you what the Republican was saying, “tax relief.”

DW: Right, they talk about tax relief…Saying that Barack Obama is going to raise your taxes. What the Democrats haven’t had is the kind of language that puts, in an emotionally compelling way, that describes both themselves and their conservative opponents, something as simple as “Well, the question isn’t who is going to cut your taxes. It’s whose taxes are going to get cut?” The reality is that in the last several years somebody made off with about seventy billion [dollars] in tax cuts, but it’s not the average middle class family that’s gotten five hundred bucks back.

That’s the kind of response that has a lot of information in it. My argument isn’t that we shouldn’t use that kind of information, but we should sandwich it into an emotionally compelling form that lets people know right away what our values are, what our priorities are. That’s what the Republicans have done so successfully by saying something like, “They see it as a revenue stream; we see it as your paycheck.” It’s conveying that we understand that you work hard for your money.

NK: At one point in your book you write, “Of particular relevance to understanding the political brain is the idea that much of our behavior reflects the activation of emotion-laden networks of association, and that much of this activation occurs outside our awareness.”

DW: Most of what we respond to—most of the time—we have no awareness of whatsoever. Consciousness—as neuroscientists often describe it—is a very limited processing mechanism, meaning there is only so much information that can get into conscious awareness, and we are responding to cues from the environment all the time; whether someone is being trust worthy, what their social class is, whether they share our values. There’s a whole host of cues we pick up on unconsciously.

NK: We’re speaking of unstated cue?

DW: Absolutely. If you ask people how did they know that a person is working class, or that person held a whitecollar job, they can’t you the cues that told them and if they tried they usually get them wrong. The same often happens in focus groups. If you ask people about Hillary Clinton’s “3 a.m.” ads; if you ask people to watch that and then describe, tell you how they found it effective, how did it make them feel about Barack Obama. They will tell you exactly what voters told exit pollsters in Ohio where she ran the ad, which was they found it unfair. In fact, a majority of Ohio Democrats thought that Hillary Clinton ran an unfair campaign against Barack Obama. That same majority also voted for her. Although the ad was consciously received as over the top or unfair as or fear mongering, unconsciously it did register.

My colleague Joel Weinberger and I did a study for CNN where we used the new technology that allows you to measure the unconscious association to a message or to an ad; it allows you essentially to measure people’s gut level feeling to what they can’t report. And what we found from people who watched the “3 a.m.” ad was what had become most active in their brain by ad were the words we tested: “weak,” “inexperience,” “terrorist,” and “Muslim.”

So, even if people couldn’t tell you what that ad activated, you could pick them up with some subtle test that can be run on the Internet that essentially measure how long it does take people to recognize a word or ignore a word. You can measure in milliseconds their response and that tells how activate that word is in their minds or brains after they been exposed to it, particularly a message or ad.

NK: I’m struck about how so much of this sounds classically Freudian, the sense that Freud had talked about the unconscious mind and how the unconscious mind is driven by wishes, fears, values, and aggression.

DW: Your point about Freud is a good one. The first person to do political consulting in America and one of the very first ad men was Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew—

NK: —Freud’s nephew! His nephew, from what I understand, is considered the godfather of PR, public relations.

DW: That’s exactly right. I’ve been meaning to read one of his books, actually, that’s been sitting on my shelf. He understood that much of the action of an ad is unconscious….

NK: Then you need to read Bernay’s book, Propaganda. Once I read your book I automatically linked it to what Bernay was saying in Propaganda. A lot of what you’d had been saying in your book I’d picked up from Bernay’s. I could see the connections.

DW: I’ve been a practicing clinical psychologist for twenty-five years and as a clinical psychologist what you’re most attuned to, what Freud really taught psychologists, psychiatrists to be attuned to is what network of associations are whirring around in the background of a person’s mind that they may not have any awareness. That is, a network of associations is simply a set of inter-connective thoughts, feelings, images and memories and emotions. In politics, if you understand what’s active when someone is angry about immigration, or if they say they believe in abortion in some circumstances but not others. Or, they want us out of Iraq but they’re concerned about a precipitous withdrawal. If you understand what’s whirring around in the background. It puts you in a much better position to be able to figure out how to speak about your position and values in a way that people can hear.

It does create an opportunities for manipulation, but I think the biggest danger is when one side understands how the minds work and the other side doesn’t. This has been the situation we’ve been in for much of the last thirty years where the Republicans understood that were are driven by our wishes, hopes, fears, aspirations, and Democrats are trying to convince [us] with rational arguments.

NK: You also stated that the Democratic establishment—especially its operatives—have “an irrational emotional commitment to rationality—one that renders them, ironically, impervious to both scientific evidence on how the political mind and brain works and accurate diagnosis of why their campaigns repeatedly fail.”

DW: Over the last year and a half I’ve given a number of presentations all over the country, both to bipartisan organizations and partisan ones and to party leaders, progressive donors, and I’ll some time be speaking in beautiful townhouses in New York City or in a beautiful home in Los Angeles, and somebody will invariably ask me: “What’s the matter with Kansas? How come these people are voting against their interests and voting for these Republicans who are giving big tax breaks to oil companies and for wealthy people? But giving them short shrift while losing their jobs and having theirs jobs shipped over seas and they can barely afford their mortgage and gas prices going up? What’s wrong with these people?”

My response was often, “Well, it’s the same thing that’s wrong with many of you, who are in the Republican tax bracket but are Democratic activists. Why is it that you care about things like poverty or the treatment of black people in this country when you are neither poor nor black? You care because you have values.” People vote on the basis of both their values and their interests.

In this election I think we’re going to see people vote much more on interests because they are getting frightened about the prospect of how they are going to pay their mortgage, fill their gas tanks, how they are going to send their kids to college. It’s those feelings that get people to vote, the feelings that are associated with values and opportunity, justice. Those are the values that drive people.

NK: While reading your book, I couldn’t help but equate some of your observations and ideas with advertising, marketing and branding. Is there a connection between the use of associative networks with advertising and branding?

DW: Yes. One of the biggest differences between Democrats and Republicans in
the last thirty years is that the Republicans have had a brand and the Democrats haven’t. When someone says “I’m running as a Republican,” you automatically know what they believe on a whole series of issues, unless they tell you otherwise. You assume that at least they espouse…

NK: May I offer what I think the Republican brand is?

DW: Yeah…

NK: National security, lower taxes, religion, a belief in God; strong family sense…

DW: You got low taxes, moral government, strong national security, family values, God and country, patriotism, Second Amendment, a whole series of things you know immediately are probably true and have been branded positively from their side. When some says they are a Democrat what comes to mind for most people is the brand that the conservative movement has attached to Democrats, which is they are the party of tax and spend; they are for big government; they are against the right to bear arms; they are for abortion on demand…

NK: They’re permissive…

DW: …They are weak on national security; they’re weak on crime, soft on terror…Look at how the two of us came up quickly with those negative associations [we threw] at the Democrats, and it’s because the conservative movement have spent thirty years and tens of billions of dollars doing the hard work of creating those phrases and creating the narratives of stories that go along with them, and having people repeat them enough times and with enough consistency that when average Americans hear the word “Democrat” and that’s what comes to their minds.

In that sense what we really have seen is a tremendously successful branding campaign by one side and virtually no branding campaign by the other. It’s almost as if you have Pepsi and Coke competing against each other; one is doing a terrific job at marketing its product and the other side is saying nothing while its competitor is saying the other tastes bad… In that sense we really are talking about branding…The same brain that buys cars and computers and laps also selects candidates and votes, and the processes aren’t identical because there are many more values involved in politics. But the process is more similar than many Democratic strategists have wanted to believe.

NK: What would you make of “Brand Obama?” And how the Democrats appealing to the political brain? Strength? Weakness?

DW: The strength of Barack Obama is that he is a phenomenally charismatic speaker, who has taken the idea of unity rather division, change, a new kind of politics, and develop that into the beginning of a [brand]. Although in many ways it’s not what he says as much as it is the ways he says it that inspires people about Barack Obama. There’s been a constant charge about him being all inspirational and has no message, but if you go to his website he has well-thought out, well developed positions on almost every major issue more so than John McCain. But he doesn’t have a well-established brand as John McCain.

He does have the problem that the other side has been working really hard for 18 months as “different,” “other,” “dangerous,” “unknown,” and “by the way, did I notice that he’s black and not like us?” That’s the branding he has to be careful of and what his campaign should be thinking of in virtually every statement that he or they make is two questions. One is, How do I not reinforce the brand that Republicans have created around Democrats for years? Such as a tax and spend liberal; the idea that Democrats are weak on national security. And how does he counteract the brand that they have attached to him? That he is “different” and “unknown” and therefore scary, aimed at activating those unconscious networks about race.

If Obama succeeds in defining himself and defining McCain and making the election about wanting to continue eight more years of Bush/McCain Republican foreign and domestic policies, then I think he’ll win by a landslide. If on the other hand, the campaign becomes a referendum on whether you really trust and feel comfortable with, really know Barack Obama, then I think John McCain will win the election.


NK: What about “Brand McCain”? Strength? Weakness?

DW: The strength of the McCain brand really is that story of his time in that POW camp, and is hard to question the courage of someone who went through that experience. And it has helped inoculate him from some of the branding problems that he could and should have at this point. He hasn’t shown in the last four years the same kind of courage of his conviction that he showed in 2000. I can tell you that the “Straight Talk Express” was his brand and it was a very successful one that appeal to people across the aisle—

NK: Yeah, I started to like him. I said, “Yeah, this is a Republican and he isn’t that bad…”

DW: I had exactly the same thought. But what has happened since then is that he has been on every side of every major issue. He opposed torture and now’s he for it. He was for comprehensive immigration reform, then he was against it, and now he seems for it again. He was against the Bush tax cuts because he thought they were irresponsible and now he’s for them. His brand is no longer working with Democrats and many independents. He also has the problem that every time he moves to the center, he makes it less likely that—particularly the Christian right—[the right] will come out to the polls and vote for him. And every time he moves right, he makes it less likely that the moderates will vote for him.

He has a real problem trying to find a brand for himself when Republicans seem to be unraveling. Ronald Reagan did a magnificent job of putting together fiscal conservatives who are often on a libertarian bent on social issues; their attitude is that they don’t want government intrusion in business and they don’t want it in their personal lives.

With Christian conservatism, which has been very much for government intrusion in people’s lives, having government can decide who can and can’t have abortion, or who can and can’t be married or have their relationships legally recognized, now that that brand is starting to crumble at the seams after eight years of George Bush being the brand manager, McCain not only has his brand of straight talker to figure out how to hold together, but also the Republican brand. It’s a pretty mighty task.

NK: Most of what you have written lends itself to political manipulation. If humans are more captive of unaware networks of associations, emotional one, how do we go about defending ourselves against manipulation? Exposing it? Is that even possible?

DW: There is an extent to which we are all vulnerable because the way in which are minds work. I guess you can say that we are all vulnerable to anyone trying to convince us to do anything, to being persuaded. When my wife says to me, “You know, I really like Indian food tonight.” Am I being manipulated or is she just telling me clearly what she wants? If she said it with less emotion, I might say, “I really want Italian,” but when she says it with that level of emotion, I know it means a lot to her. I say, “Sure, let’s have Indian.”

I think the really danger is when one side understands how to appeal to voters and the other side doesn’t. When one side understands that people are driven by their hopes and fears and that the other side thinks they are drawn by their facts and figures. That’s when you really have the danger of propaganda and manipulation that’s comparable to what you get in many respects to a one-party state, because only one side understands how to reach people.

What I’m hoping that happens in this election, and certainly what I’ve tried to do with this book and with my work, is try to arm the left so that the fight is a little more even. Progressives and Democrats can speak honestly and openly about their values and stop running from issues like abortion, immigration or guns or taxes or national security, and instead can talk in emotionally compelling ways about their values and their policies. To the extent that both sides are communicating effectively, that’s when you see democracy working well. Elections aren’t primarily debates about issues, they are debates about values and priorities.

Do you fundamentally believe, for example, that it really doesn’t matter that we should let the market determine which jobs should go where? Let the chips fall where they may fall and sure let someone lose their job in Michigan, but they ought to stop whining about someone getting a job in Tennessee or Beijing? Do you believe that or do you believe that it’s the job of leadership and government to ease people through times of transition, and to not let big business write their own rules so that we have a government that works for working Americans rather large multinational corporations? That’s a pretty big difference in basic values and how much empathy you have towards people have been displaced from their jobs, about whether or not you have lost your job.

Those are the questions which election are about and come down to. So, I’m less worried about manipulation if both sides understand how speak their lines in emotionally compelling ways. I worry much more about manipulation when one side knows how to do it well and one side doesn’t even know what the basic principles are.