Why do so many millions of ordinary voters believe Barack Obama is a Muslim and that he was born in Kenya? Why do millions still believe WMD were found in Iraq after the war? Why did a majority believe that Saddam was behind 9-11 on the eve of the Iraq War?
These are some of the important questions Rick Shenkman answers in his new book Political Animals: How Our Stone-Age Brain Gets in the Way of Smart Politics, published by Basic Books. Rick is also the founder and publisher of the History News Network, the New York Times bestselling author of seven books, and an elected fellow of the Society of American Historians. I’ve asked him five questions about his research and how it relates to a small matter you may have heard of: the upcoming presidential election.
Let's turn your book's subtitle into a question. How does our stone-age brain get in the way of smart politics?
Our brain evolved to address the problems hunter-gatherers faced in the Stone Age. So our brain works well when operating in a small community of less than 150 people, the type of community that prevailed in the Stone Age. Alas, in the modern world we are members of societies that consist of millions of people. And our brain doesn’t work very well under these circumstances.
Consider the way we evaluate politicians. Most of us do it by instinct. We watch politicians on a TV debate and form instant impressions of them. In a small community where everybody knows everybody you can trust your instant impressions because they’re layered on top of a thick cake of experience. Living and working with people provides you with a deep knowledge base. So if someone you really know makes a promise, you are in a position to evaluate their sincerity in an instant. We aren’t in the same position when we see candidates on TV whom we don’t live and work around. But our brain tricks us into thinking we can trust our impressions because we trust our visual system (about half of our brain is devoted to visual tasks). A flare should go up in our brain when the context is wrong as it is in this case where we can’t trust our gut. But no flare goes off. And we just go with our impressions. This is an error.
Another example: When something painful happens to someone we know we feel empathy for them, particularly if we are in their physical presence when this happens. We will not literally feel their pain, but we’ll experience the same emotions they’re feeling. Our eyes may well up in tears. Our face may scrunch up like we ourselves are in pain. But this feeling of empathy, one of the human being’s most powerful and positive capacities, is impaired when we’re dealing with people we don’t know. It’s especially difficult for us to feel empathy for people who talk different, look different, and dress different. And if they happen to live thousands of miles away, it’s really hard to feel for them. Yet in the modern world we are constantly deciding problems that involve people who live thousands of miles away and who are different from us. This is a real problem.
Fascinating. I can’t help but think, unsurprisingly, of Trump. When potential Republican primary voters made their instant impressions of him, what happened?
Here’s what happened. Trump pushed their Stone-Age brain buttons and they responded like animals in a lab rat stimulus/response experiment. It’s been amazing—and scary—to watch.
His two big issues have been immigration and terrorism. It’s no accident he settled on these two in particular. Both are especially susceptible to instinctive responses. This is because our Stone-Age brain is highly sensitive to threats. Take immigration. We are inherently suspicious of people who don’t look like us or talk like us. It was therefore easy for Trump to demonize Mexican immigrants as murderers and rapists. When he proposed blocking Muslims from entering the United States he was again playing on our fear of the outsider.
It is no surprise that low information voters have proved to be his staunchest supporters. Lacking a strong knowledge base about real Mexicans and Muslims they had no way to independently verify his claims. So they just went with their gut, which places a high priority on “better-be-safe-than-sorry” responses. This is the fire alarm bias at work. Human beings come equipped with highly sensitive threat detectors—just like the smoke alarms in your home. By nature we’d rather risk overreacting to a possibly false fire alarm than miss a real one. If it’s false so what? Life goes on. But if you miss a bonafide alarm your very survival can be in danger. So we tend to overreact to perceived threats.
As many have noted Trump is hardly the first national candidate to dip into this cesspool of ugly emotion. George Herbert Walker Bush—the Good Bush—did it in 1988 with the ad showing black prisoners going through a revolving door in a dimly lit scary environment calculated to play on white fears of crime. But Trump has made no attempt to hide what he’s doing. It’s the reason KKK leaders have come out in support of his candidacy.
Given that instant impressions are so important, could different—perhaps more critical—responses by the media and/or other candidates have altered the race?
Most of the time national politicians decline to go where Trump has in the manner he has. Institutional norms limit their freedom of action. Few, for example, want to risk being called out as racist. Not since George Wallace ran in 1972 has any serious candidate for the presidency skated that thin line and willingly crossed it. But Trump hasn’t worried about breaking norms. It’s part of his shtick. The more norms he contravenes, the more popular he gets. It’s why he keeps attacking political correctness. This year many people are in such an angry mood they want to see the Old Order fall. To the Bastille! Onward!
So given the current anti-establishment environment I’m not sure that anything anybody said could have made a difference as long as multiple candidates were competing for the prize. The only way Trump could have been stopped is if the establishment had been able to make this a two-person race early on by clearing the field for one rival with a popular appeal. They tried. It’s why they coalesced around Jeb! But Jeb! proved to be a poor candidate and the others in the race refused to politely step aside for his benefit.
The media might have made a difference. But seriously—does anybody think the media were about to turn away the audience Trump brings with him wherever he goes? He’s catnip for them. He sells newspapers and draws huge ratings.
The only real protection against a demagogue like Trump is if the voters are smart. They have to know when they’re being played. A flare needs to go off in their head when they sense a politician is trying to trigger an automatic instinctive response. They need to know to second guess themselves in such circumstances to make sure their response suits the context, as it does on rare occasions. (Sometimes we actually do have to fear the outsider.) But we don’t live in a country of smart voters. We prefer reacting to thinking. I understand the impulse to go with your gut. As a human being myself (inset ironic emoji here) I’ve gone with my instincts plenty of times in politics. But it’s something that needs to be resisted.
Alrighty, then (I say with a weary smile). What, if anything, can we do as a society to counteract or change our tendency to react rather than think? Can we stop our stone-age brains from getting in the way of our politics?
We are going to feel what we’re going to feel. There’s no getting around that. But thanks to science we now can begin to account for our reactions. Science is helping teach us how our brain works. Daniel Kahneman has taught us that we are biased to feel a loss more than a gain (which makes us susceptible to political manipulation when a politician warns that the group to which we belong is in danger of losing its place in society, the claim Sarah Palin implicitly made when she brayed, “we want our country back” ). John Hibbing has produced stunning research that suggests up to 50 percent of our political orientation may be heritable (which suggests that there may be limits to our ability to talk someone out of their deep beliefs).
Nicholas Epley has helped illuminate the reasons the wealthy often seem indifferent to the fate of the poor (which perhaps accounts for their reputation for hard-heartedness).
So the first step is to study science and learn all we can about our automatic responses. This is not beyond us. The findings of science can be incorporated into school curricula. Classes can be organized so students can hash out the complicated issues raised by this research. What could be more exciting than debating whether a rich person’s empathy is constrained by their feeling of self-satisfaction, as demonstrated by scans of their brain when looking at a picture of a homeless person?
The reason I wrote Political Animals was, first and foremost, to educate myself about this literature, and secondarily, to share what I’ve learned with others. I wouldn’t have written the book if I weren’t convinced that it’s possible to change our understanding of politics by better understanding ourselves.
This is a hopeful, optimistic message and I really believe in it.
And, finally, what advice would you give to Hillary Clinton, as the presumptive Democratic nominee, to present her case in the best possible way given our stone-age brains?
She has one overriding problem and it’s not her vote for the Iraq War or the hundreds of thousands of dollars she was paid for speeches to Wall Street fat cats. Her problem is that up to this moment the campaign has been all about her: her war vote, her paid speeches, her impressive resume and, of course, her marriage to former President Bill Clinton. It was inevitable that her rivals and the media would want to talk about these subjects, but in the end what matters is not who she is or what she’s done, but how the voters feel in her presence. Do they feel smart or dumb when she talks? Do they feel patriotic? Do they feel idealistic? A year into her campaign it’s not clear what emotion or set of emotions they should be feeling. This is campaign malpractice. By now it should be crystal clear what supporters should be feeling.
Why is this important? Because politics isn’t rational. In the end it’s not about the individual who makes the best argument, important as those arguments may be. Because of the way we evolved, what matters most is emotion and the evolved psychological mechanisms that shape our responses.
Oddly, Donald Trump, the non-politician politician, figured this out better than any of the other candidates, though they have had far more experience than he has in connecting with large pools of voters. His supporters know what emotion they’re supposed to have when he’s on stage. They’re supposed to feel empowered, patriotic, and hopeful. Trump is going to put them back on top. Though the media stigmatize them as ignorant rubes, in his presence they feel smart. He tells them it’s okay to think politically incorrect thoughts. And because he’s rich and powerful—a real alpha male if ever there was one—his stamp of approval validates the grievances they’ve long felt.
So my advice for Hillary is to figure out immediately what emotion she wants her voters to feel and then design her campaign in such a way as to draw out the desired response. Do that and she’ll be more formidable than anybody else in the race.
(Private message to Hillary: Please figure this out. Nothing less than the fate of Western civilization hangs in the balance. We simply cannot risk Donald Trump becoming president of the United States.)
You may be wondering why Hillary should take my advice. After all, she’s far ahead of Trump in the polls. Alas, her higher poll numbers aren’t a guarantee of victory in November. While she’s obviously more appealing to a general electorate than Trump for many reasons—she doesn’t spout nonsense, she generally sticks to the facts as rational people understand them, and she invariably knows what she’s talking about—no one should count on reason prevailing. We may be one big terrorist attack away from a Trump presidency. Such an attack would trigger ancient instincts to follow a dominant alpha male in a time of crisis. Hillary, tough as she is in foreign policy, would have a hard time competing with Trump on what would be his natural turf. To hang onto her lead she would need to have a strong bond with voters, one that goes beyond reason. The time to establish such a bond is now.