Our Irrational Politics…

This weekend I’m leading an adult education class at another church about predictable irrationality and politics. I agreed to do this class months ago. When I got back in touch with the guy who extended the invitation, I was like: “Well, I’m happy to come if you still want me…but this election season is so normal…what would we talk about?” Yeah…not so much.

Given this election cycle is the craziest in recent memory it’s worth talking a little bit about how irrationality impacts our politics.

While our rationality is great and fantastic (and I really mean this), unfortunately most of our thinking doesn’t occur at the level of the rational. Nearly all of our thinking takes place below the level of our awareness. For more on this see this short video about our two brains. (I wind up on an elephant in Portland…it’s fun.) http://irrationaljesus.com/video_listing/two-minds/ And while our rational riders aren’t entirely out of control, these emotional elephants of ours are incredibly powerful. It turns out this is especially true when our emotional elephants are disgusted, angry, or afraid.

Social scientists have been doing amazing work studying the impact of emotion on how we vote. The results are humbling.

It turns out disgust is incredibly powerful. Voters who are more easily disgusted tend to vote more conservatively. http://spp.sagepub.com/content/3/5/537.abstract

When voters are primed by disease imagery our xenophobia, fear of otherness, increases. http://spp.sagepub.com/content/3/5/537.abstract

Priming voters with awful smells can make us less tolerant of gay men. http://psycnet.apa.org/?&fa=main.doiLanding&doi=10.1037/a0023984

The disgust factor of a possible criminal act changes how juries award sentences. https://kar.kent.ac.uk/32970/1/Flexibility%20author%20final.pdf

Anger and fear also powerfully effect us. Anger makes us less reflective as voters and less willing to do due diligence and research on potential candidates. http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2010/02/26/0956797610364006.full

People who exhibit cognitive neophobia (fear of novelty) tend to vote more conservatively. http://www.psych.nyu.edu/vanbavel/lab/documents/Jost.etal.2014.BBS.pdf

And unfortunately for civility, due to negativity bias, negative messaging really does have a greater impact than positive ads. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3652533/

Most disturbing, factors completely unrelated to the merits of a candidate can often have a great impact on how we vote. No surprise that there is evidence that our explicit and implicit views on race (and no doubt gender, but this study is confined to race) impact our choices. http://www.uky.edu/AS/PoliSci/Peffley/pdf/Payne%20et%20al%202010%20JESP.pdf

But would you believe if the weather has been good or not we lean more or less favorably towards incumbents? (As if they have anything to do with local weather patterns.) http://www.international.ucla.edu/media/files/PERG.Achen.pdf

Perhaps most sadly, how local football teams perform has a similar effect on whether we support incumbents or desire change. http://www.pnas.org/content/107/29/12804.full

The good news is awareness really can make a difference. Being humble and acknowledging that it isn’t just THOSE nimrods over there that are biased but we are as well goes a long way not only to restoring a more civil society but to ensuring you are a more informed voter.

The most important thing we can do right now is to behave more like cultural anthropologists. Rather than turn our nose up at our neighbors who really seem nuts to us, it’s time to look a little more thoughtfully and empathetically at what might actually be driving their feelings and decisions.

One of things that makes me the happiest is pastoring a church that truly is politically diverse. Congregations are one of the last public spaces left where people of truly different opinions still gather together. These kinds of meeting places are crucial- because no matter who wins, we are all going to have to move forward together people.