"I’m afraid
what Thanksgiving will be like, no
matter how the election turns out,” a
friend commented. She’s not wrong to
be worried. Elections bring up all
sorts of emotions and behaviors that
create division. Understanding our
“brains on elections” can help.
Psychologists
note
that we all have many identities. Some of
mine include writer, trainer, wife, and
daughter. When my father had a health
crisis, being a daughter became far more
important to me than being a writer. Yet
later, when I saw poor communication at a
board meeting, my identity as a conflict
trainer came to the fore.
Now, as
we are deluged with election-season news,
our political identities not only are
triggered but also affect our behaviors
even beyond politics. As Stanford
political scientist Shanto Iyengar found,
we’re less likely to hire someone from the
other party, definitely don’t want our
children marrying across the political
divide, and all of this is worsening
because we don’t have norms to control
negative political speech. In democratic
terms, we’re losing opportunities for
conversations to understand others’ ideas
about the problems we share.
Strong
political
identities have other consequences
for democracy. We police our own
“in-group” to maintain the purity
of our side. Think of the left’s
cancel culture and the right’s
repudiation of Liz Cheney despite
her near perfect Trumpian voting
record. We lose diversity of
thought in our society, and we
also lose our own choice at the
ballot box as we become reluctant
to vote for someone we agree with
but is from the other party. We
lose moderate leaders, even though
democracies need these “Boundary
Leaders” who
can
form constructive connections with
others to find lasting solutions
to our problems.
A
whole lot of neurobiology is at
play here. We normally think of
“fight or flight” in response to
physical threats, but we’ve
learned that social situations
trigger threat responses.
Encountering an inflammatory
campaign assertion from “the other
side”, we suffer from “Amygdala
Hijack”.
Anger or fear floods our brain so
that we can’t think straight. We
also suffer from confirmation
bias, an inbuilt tendency to
remember information that confirms
our theories of the world and
ignore anything contradictory.
The
approach
of elections makes this worse.
During the 2012 election,
neuroscientist Emily Falk asked
Democrats and Republicans to
ponder how either Obama or McCain
thought about issues. She tracked
which parts of the brain lit up
and found that, the closer it got
to the election, the less able
participants were to think about
the thinking of the other
candidate. Another
More
Recent Study examined
cellphone
data and found that people who
spent Thanksgiving with members of
another party cut those outings
short – even shorter if they had
been in areas saturated by very
negative campaign ads.
So how
can we tame our election-amped
neurobiology? Self-knowledge is key. We
can learn to spot moments when we’re
taking the easy way out of examining
candidates and policy options. Are we too
quickly putting on our partisan identities
or can we be more open-minded?
We can
also consciously reach out to someone who
might be voting differently and ask
genuinely curious questions about their
thinking. This can be tough, but it’s a
great way to ensure our thinking is as
complex as the problems we face.
Finally,
we can uphold norms of peaceful democratic
behavior by censuring rather than
supporting anyone who suggests
election-related violence. We’ll all still
be in the same country when the election
is over. Our democracy needs calm citizens
working together – and talking at
Thanksgiving.
