Yesterday afternoon at Barnes and Noble I found a particularly good article in American Scientist magazine about the somewhat-nebulous concept of “emotional intelligence,” and the scientific questions related to it. One specific fact in the article led me to clarify something unusual about myself, and also form an intriguing hypothesis about the neurology of politics, and particularly the tendency toward bigotry.
I offer a theory that, often for physical, neurological reasons, people who use rational bases for decision-making may tend to be liberal, and people who use emotional bases for decision-making may tend to be conservative. My path to this theory leads through the front of my own brain, which has literally, physically, in all seriousness, lost its ability to use emotion to make decisions. This affects my way of thinking in ways that I believe shed some light on political thinking in general.
You know how abnormal psychology has long been a focus of psychological research, because the exceptions to the rule shed light on how the mind functions in a way that normalcy doesn’t? My own unusual neurology has become my personal laboratory. I have injuries to my prefrontal cortex and the fronts of my temporal lobes. I also have some other unusual neurology that I was born with, but which I won’t get into here.
This knowledge is important because it clues me in to specific physical reasons for unusual features of my personality, intellectual style, and behavior. The neuro quirks are also uncommon enough to be useful for comparing and contrasting myself with “normal” people (in a world where we are all unique, there is no “normal,” but at any rate people who mostly don’t have these specific conditions). A little knowledge of the things that make one’s own brain unique can be quite helpful in forming an experiential understanding or model of the way brains in general work, and why people are the way they are.
Anyway, the American Scientist article (“Feeling Smart: The Science of Emotional Intelligence” by Daisy Grewal and Peter Salovey) described an early 90’s study that shed light on emotional decision-making:
One group of participants in this study had been identified as having lesions to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex of the brain. Patients with this type of brain damage have normal intellectual function but are unable to use emotion in making decisions. The other group was normal, meaning that their brains were fully intact. Because there was no way for any of the players to calculate precisely which decks were riskier, they had to rely on their “gut” feelings to avoid losing money.
Damaiso’s group demonstrated that the brain-lesion patients failed to pay attention to these feelings (which he deems “somatic markers”) and subsequently lost significantly more money than the normal participants. Therefore, defects in the brain that impair emotion and feeling detection can subsequently impair decision-making. Damasio concluded that “individuals make judgments not only by assessing the severity of outcomes, but also and primarily in terms of their emotional quality.” This experiment demonstrates that emotions and thought processes are closely connected. Whatever notions we draw from our Stoic and Cartesian heritages, separating thinking and feeling is not necessarily more adaptive and may, in some cases, lead to disastrous consequences.”
The day before yesterday my boyfriend and I went to the grocery store together. I wanted to buy some kind of frozen food to eat for dinner this week. After mulling several choices with price and taste in mind, I picked up a small-size Digiorno veggie pizza and took it to our cart. I started to think about nutrition, though–the pizza had quite a lot of crust and fat and not enough of anything healthy. I stopped, frozen by indecision. It wasn’t obvious which of the factors was more important. “Put it in the cart,” said my boyfriend, who wanted to check out and go home. I explained my dilemma. “Put it in the cart and come on,” he said, in a flash of irritability, “it’s not that hard to make a decision.” I did as he asked and felt unhappy with myself. “It really is that hard for me to make a decision,” I said.
This scene probably doesn’t sound unusual at all. But it happens so constantly to me that I’ve long understood that there is something abnormal going on. I am an extraordinarily slow and indecisive shopper! As far as I can tell, it is literally true of me that I can’t and don’t use my emotions to make a decision. If I can’t make a satisfying decision based on logical factors, I have to fish around for something to break the tie (or be aided by my boyfriend demanding that I put the pizza in the cart!).
I think this insight about emotions and decision-making has broader implications. Both the article and my own long experience support the idea that “separating thinking and feeling is not necessarily more adaptive and may, in some cases, lead to disastrous consequences.” But it could be very misleading to connect more strongly emotional decision-making with “higher emotional intelligence.”
I suggest that, for instance, people who tend to strongly base their judgments on emotions are more susceptible to become bigots. The anti-gay movement, for instance, has no logical underpinning, unless you count some ambiguously-applicable scripture references. It rests fundamentally on its members experiencing their distressed emotions about homosexuality as valid information on which to base an ideological choice (in some cases, distressed emotions about their own homosexual inclinations).
A Daily Kos diary this morning about the experience of seeing the news world through the FoxNews lens described The O’Reilly Factor thus: “The show is all about placing blame. Almost every story centered on getting at who was ‘at fault.'” Commenters interpreted this as a culture of victimhood–but what if it is more accurately seeking to use emotions as a basis for grasping the nature of events and their causes–as a valid means of discernment? Who’s at fault? Probably the usual suspects, if our feelings tell us right.
Some people who use the emotional style of reasoning feel besieged by modernity and challenges to traditional beliefs about the nature of things. Scientific reasoning has been considered by some conservatives through the ages to be anathema, nihilistic, disturbing– because it is guarded against emotional reasoning and the “wise judgment” of emotionally-justified human beliefs. And this is perceived as tantamount to being against God–against morality and reality and the truest authority!
Scientists and liberals are as emotional as conservatives, and are no less able to have convictions (or religious feelings). But, are we people who, for neurologically-based reasons, tend to make decisions based on various external factors, more so than on emotions? And are far-right conservatives people who, for neurologically-based reasons, experience their emotions as a strong basis for decision-making?
I am liable to be misunderstood: I’m not remotely saying that liberals are brain-damaged, nor that brain injury makes you more “logical,” nor that wingnuts should be lobotomized. I was always a logical thinker and I am 90% sure I would have been a liberal regardless of whether I’d hit my head. But this specific unusual feature of my neurology, the loss of my ability to use emotion as a direct decision-making criterion, does make me think a little about the role of this particular faculty in human life.
There are some highly intelligent people who are staunch bigots. Poor reasoning ability is not necessarily the problem; an unfortunate judgment based on a negative emotional feeling is. Some people, maybe particularly more intelligent people, can be convinced that factual evidence or rational arguments are compelling enough to outweigh the emotion, and they can change their opinion. During the 20th century there were a great many people who came to realize blacks and whites are not different kinds of people but morally the same kind, and bigotry and segregation therefore irrational and morally and socially harmful. Gradually a similar kind of realization is happening in regards to homosexuality. Though there will always be bigots, because some susceptible people will always feel emotionally uncomfortable about particular categories of people, and behave as bigots. This is human nature.
(I would argue that I am particularly non-susceptible to that type of bigotry. And yet, I want to make the point that I could be bigoted in a slightly different sense, because I have certain convictions and beliefs, and I am sometimes prone to pass judgment on groups of people I think are wrongheaded or ignorant or uncompassionate. Perhaps this is the typical liberal version of bigotry–and I take it seriously. The “rationality” of it can be seductive [“what’s the matter with Kansas??? they’re fucking morons who vote for the culture war rather than their own interests, that’s what!!!”], but since it can lead to unkindness and divisiveness, it does concern me. I think the conservatives call it “liberal elitism;” if you think about it a little bit it makes a little sense as the “enlightened” rationalist’s “elite” scorn for the non-rationalist. What would happen if we appropriated the term “elitism” to use ourselves? Hey, if gays can call each other fags, and blacks can call each other niggas, liberals can surely call each other elite, or, ah, 1337, though that would be a different connotation. 🙂
This diary is not the entire explanation for the brain basis of political alignment, and I don’t believe liberals and conservatives split strictly as “rational vs emotional.” But divisions on a fair number of issues, especially bias issues, can be described at least partly along the lines of (negative emotional judgment) vs (positive emotional judgment and/or rational judgment).
Some Americans had the appropriate negative emotional reaction to terrorists, and used that as a basis for supporting actions to destroy or at least defy and torment Muslims in general. And they are scornful toward the liberals who have had the same appropriate negative emotional reaction, but use a rational basis to argue for reality-based strategies to prevent and defend against terrorism rather than making more terrorists by enflaming the whole Middle East. They are scornful because the liberals’ failure to use their emotional pain and anger as a basis for their course of action seems just wrong, and almost inhuman. It calls their loyalties into question.
See? Am I right, is so much of this based on such a little aspect of the way the brain works?
The American Scientist article includes a little portrait of Mr. Spock captioned, “Emotion was considered irrational by the Stoics, a view that has persisted into modern times and is epitomized by the character of Spock, played by Leonard Nimoy on the Star Trek television series. Spock hailed from the planet Vulcan, where pure logic is exalted, making him the consummate Starfleet science officer; yet his Vulcan father had married a human schoolteacher, giving Spock a vulnerable emotional side.” Spock was as “human” as anyone else, but his ability to make decisions based on logic alone gave him a particular kind of wise judgment.
(Incidentally, there’s a book titled Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet. It’s not a reference to Spock, but “an allusion to Vulcan, the crippled armaments maker of the Gods, who defended heaven.” I think the neo-cons are Romulans. 🙂
I’m not going to claim I’ve never asked for recommends before, but I am going to claim this is the most important and thoughtful diary I have written, and I do hope people will get to see it and think about it. There are many theories about why people are liberal or conservative. George Lakoff’s strict father/nurturant parent model is one I have respected but increasingly felt dissatisfied by. Yes, people have these kinds of models in their heads–but why? Physically, neurologically, where does it come from? That question is not quite answered in this diary, but I think it’s very related. Perhaps because people who reason less on emotion are less behaviorally reactive and more, well, nurturant.
(x-posted from Daily Kos)
Update [2005-8-3 15:5:37 by Elizabeth D]: Some people had questions about, for instance, whether I am wrongly over-simplifying everything to a dichotomy between rational and emotional. My point is more specific than that, and my replies below go into more detail about that and other questions.