Our tendency to embrace an ideological pack if it is being defended by the political party we vote for is so general that we are even capable of ignoring the information that contradicts its postulates and exaggerating the information that confirms them .
To demonstrate to what extent this is so, even if it can be identified in the activity of our brain, in 2004 Drew Westen made use of images obtained by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of fifteen people who defined themselves as Democrats and fifteen people, as Republicans.
After entering the scanner, subjects had to look at eighteen sets of slides showing, for example, statements by President George W. Bush or his Democratic rival, John Kerry . If in one slide a president affirmed one thing, in the next, taken some time later, another affirmation was made that was clearly contradicting the previous one.
What Westen wanted to measure was how that contradiction was evaluated . What happened is that if the president who contradicted himself belonged to his ideology, then areas of the brain associated with the threat were activated in the subject. If it was of the opposite ideology, the subject did not feel any threat, and could even experience some pleasure.
Partisan brain
As Jonathan Haidt writes in his book The Minds of the Righteous : “Threatening information (the hypocrisy of his own candidate) immediately activated a network of brain areas related to emotion, areas associated with negative emotion and responses to punishment [ …] Activated areas included the insula, central prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, ventromedial CPV, and posterior cingulate cortex. ”
What these results reveal is that a partisan brain, that is, one committed to an ideology or a political party, works with intuitive emotional processes and that, on many occasions, if the reason participates, it is to justify the new information so that it don’t tear down previous beliefs or prejudices. Or as Benjamin Franklin summed it up: “Being rational creatures is very convenient, because it allows us to find or invent a reason for whatever we want.”
In fact, the current politics, so mediatic, so Twitter, so zascas where what matters is ingenuity and rhetoric and not so much solid proposals at a rational level, this dynamic of confrontation between two opposing poles prevails more than ever. they have nothing in common . For that reason, political partisanship increasingly resembles sports fanaticism. Not surprisingly, testosterone levels soar or drop on election night just as they do on Sundays at the Super Bowl or any other major sporting event, as a 2009 study noted.
All of this, moreover, is orchestrated by elegant systems of self-deception and by what psychologists call “motivated reasoning,” that is, directing an argument toward a preferred conclusion rather than directing it as far as it takes us . As Haidt abounds: “And if this happens, then it would explain why extreme partisans are so stubborn, closed-minded, and so addicted to beliefs that they often seem strange or paranoid.”
