Emotion Trumps Logic in the Voting Booth

An August op-ed in Kenya's Daily Nation included this sentence: "The candidates will do well to go out and buy a book entitled The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, by Drew Westen." Quoting the article's author, Charles Onyango-Obbo, "Westen has studied elections over the years, and found an inconvenient truth: People almost always vote for the candidate who elicits the right feelings, not the one who presents the best arguments."

Closer to home, as Westen points out, the Republicans led by Karl Rove consistently beat the Democrats at playing to the electorate's emotions. All logic points to Republican losses in '08. But logic doesn't vote -- and logic doesn't win elections. Will the Democrats once more snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, or can they finally learn the crucial lesson that hearts lead minds? Drew Westen weighs in.

Drew Westen received his B.A. at Harvard, an M.A. in social and political thought at the University of Sussex (England) and his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the University of Michigan. For several years he was chief psychologist at Cambridge Hospital and associate professor at Harvard Medical School. He is a commentator on NPR's All Things Considered and teaches at Emory University.

Terrence McNally: Your Ph.D. is in clinical psychology. You were chief psychologist at a hospital. What was your path to your current focus on politics?

Drew Westen: I think that's a question I've never been asked in about 200 interviews. As a clinical psychologist, I do research in psychology and neuroscience, but I've also been a practicing clinician for 25 years. Many might assume it's an easy move from studying personality disorders to studying politicians.

As a clinician, when people are talking with you, you're listening to hear what's whirring in the background. What thoughts and feelings are connected in the back of their heads, leading them to do things they wish they could stop doing? You're also listening for things they're in conflict about.

In many ways, you're listening for the same thing in politics -- or you should be. What is whirring in the background when people get angry about immigration, or when there are only two flags burned a year, but they cast their votes based on flag burning? What's getting triggered? That's the piece that I think is continuous between my life as a clinical psychologist and now as a political strategist and adviser.

McNally: Thomas Frank's big question in What's Wrong with Kansas was why do people vote against their own self-interest? And that's the same thing that a clinical psychologist is looking for, isn't it? Why do people behave against their own self-interest?

Westen: Over the last year, I found myself speaking to a lot of Democratic and progressive organizations -- particularly donors who've been giving lots of money to the Democratic Party and watching it go down the tubes. Almost invariably we get the question from somebody, "So what's the matter with Kansas? How come people are voting against their self interest?" And my response was often the same, "Well, what's the matter with you? Here you are, someone with the wealth to contribute to a Democratic campaign, which means you're in the Republican tax bracket, yet you're voting against your own self-interest. You're doing it because of your values. And that's the same reason that a lot of voters in Kansas are voting against theirs."

As much as anything else, it's the role of a leader to set the emotional agenda for what values are most central in an election year. And that's where I think Republicans have been so much more effective than Democrats over the last 40 years.

McNally: Why did you write this book?

Westen: To tell you the truth, I've always followed politics carefully. I still remember to this day sitting in my living room with a group of people watching Michael Dukakis offer that horrible answer about what he would do if his wife were raped and murdered -- which Bill Maher has summarized as "whatever."