I pick on partisans a lot, especially Democrats. It isn't that Democrat partisanship is especially galling to me, it's that the issues I am most concerned about are fubared mostly by Democrats, as noted in the recent post Bumper Crop that discussed their corrupt and ineffective association with greens.

Partisanship is a mind killer.

The researchers also used neuroimaging to look at the neural responses of individuals who described themselves as partisan. They showed the participants one of three groups of slides: one group about their party's candidate, one about the other party's candidate, or one about a neutral control subject. In each group, the first slide revealed a position the politician had taken, and the second depicted a contradiction — something the candidate had done or said that seemed to be contrary to what the first slide was saying. Not only were the participants unable to see the contradiction for their own candidate, but the neuroimaging showed that they were regulating their emotional response.

The psychologists specifically saw large areas of activation in the prefrontal cortex, which indicated emotional influence on reasoning, and in the posterior cingulated cortex, associated with forgivability. Essentially, participants detected the contradiction in their reasoning, but they weren't allowing it to affect their opinion. Westen describes this as "motivated reasoning."

There's more. Westen showed the participants yet another slide, this one offering a rationale for the earlier contradiction: large areas in the ventral striatum became active, suggesting that participants were rewarding themselves for working through the problem. This combination of the suppressed negative emotions and reward for reaching a biased conclusion "suggests why motivated judgments may be so difficult to change," Westen wrote. "They are doubly reinforcing."

This sort of deceit is apparent when conversing with partisans. Their desperate and slidey-eyed efforts to maintain nonsensical views are visible, even when you can't actually see them. They seem stupid as well as mean spirited, an impression that colors judgements about their whole lives, even their professional and not explicitly political work. Highly partisan academics, for instance, seem third rate to me. Journalists, in general, are simply laughable due to their partisanship which enables them to write the silliest stuff and feel good about it. They are pleased and proud of their stupidity.

. . . general elections are actually won by courting the independents — the one-third of the population that votes based on the options presented them each year. How do these people decide? A lot of them use shortcuts too. Some will obviously look at the issues, the economy, and the current state of the country and make an educated decision. But again, some people just don't have the time. These people turn to their guts — or at least a more automatic part of their brain.

Thought is work and takes time and energy to do. In my view we are indebted to independents, the ones who actually think about things, and it would be good if there was some way to reward and encourage them.

The brief synopsis of this article that came in on the RSS feed is an interesting teaser that I expected to read more about when I clicked through to the article.

The founders of the United States didn't have the advantages of fMRI imaging and had no concept of the amygdala, but were hesitant about political parties and political campaigning nonetheless. Turns out there was some reason to be concerned -- many psychological studies have shown that political affiliation plays a large role not just in the voting booth but also when people must decide how they feel about political issues.

That text appears nowhere in the article itself and the subject is not further explored. Too bad.