Integrity News

I highly recommend this article from Salon.com about voter choice and the psychology behind it. To use an old adage, love is blind - even the voter’s love for his or her chosen candidate.

In the current presidential election, a major percentage of voters are already committed to “their candidate”; new arguments and evidence fall on deaf ears. And yet, if we, as a country, truly want change, we must be open-minded, flexible and willing to revise our opinions when new evidence warrants it. Most important, we must be able to recognize and acknowledge when we are wrong.

Referring to a study completed in 1999 at Cornell:

The article’s conclusion should be posted as a caveat under every political speech of those seeking office. And it should serve as the epitaph for the Bush administration: “People who lack the knowledge or wisdom to perform well are often unaware of this fact. That is, the same incompetence that leads them to make wrong choices also deprives them of the savvy necessary to recognize competence, be it their own or anyone else’s.”

And another studied completed at Emory:

Westen asked staunch party members from both sides to evaluate negative (defamatory) information about their 2004 presidential choice. Areas of the brain (prefrontal cortex) normally engaged during reasoning failed to show increased activation. Instead, the limbic system — the center for emotional processing — lit up dramatically. According to Westen, both Republicans and Democrats “reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted” (cognitive dissonance).

What always amazes me is how often scientific studies confirm common sense.