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In The Political Brain, psychologist Drew Westen embarks on a veritable tour-de-force across brain research, political campaigning, and recent U.S. history. The book is intended for a general readership interested in politics, neuroscience, leadership, and psychology. The goal is to illustrate how emotions, and brain mechanisms related to emotions, determine people's voting behaviors.
The main contention of this book is that voters make decisions not by dispassionately weighing facts but, rather, on the basis of complex emotional processes related to partisanship, values, and feelings about candidates. Drawing from his experience as a clinician, as well as from neuro-scientiflc research including his own studies on decision-making and subliminal priming, Westen emphasizes the importance of emotional messages, verbal as well as nonverbal, in running a successful political campaign. These include a well-crafted, passionate, and emotionally truthful speech, the soundtrack of an ad, a candidate's body-language and facial expression, or subliminal flashes on a TV screen. The author illustrates his point by presenting and analyzing a host of excerpts transcribed from successful and unsuccessful campaigns in the United States, both Republican and Democrat.
The first part of the book focuses on contrasting models of bounded rationality, which emphasize a view of the mind as a rather dispassionate “marketplace of ideas”, with a view of the political mind as a “market place of emotions,” where emotional allegiance to party remains the central determinant of voting behavior. Thus, the author suggests candidates should not try to convince partisans to “bend their minds” to the opposite side. Instead, the focus of a campaign should be on getting their own partisans engaged to vote and on winning over those that are nondecided.
The second part of The Political Brain describes strategies to design an emotionally com