Cognitive Neuroscience and Political Attitudes 1 IN PRESS, Political Psychology Is political cognition like riding a bicycle? How cognitive neuroscience can inform research on political thinking

This paper proposes that understanding of political phenomena including political attitudes and political sophistication can be enriched by incorporating the theories and tools of cognitive neuroscience. In particular, the cognitive neuroscience of nonconscious habitual cognition (akin to bicycle riding) and various memory systems are reviewed in order to describe the different types of informational blocks out of which different types of political attitudes may be built. A Reflection-Reflexion model is then presented which describes how these building blocks combine to produce political attitudes as a function of goals, primes, expertise, and inherent conflict in considerations relevant to the attitude. The ways in which neuroimaging methods can be used to test hypotheses of political cognition are reviewed. Finally, the paper concludes with a discussion of important concerns for researchers investigating the neural bases of the political mind. Cognitive Neuroscience and Political Attitudes 3 Is political sophistication like riding a bicycle? How cognitive neuroscience can inform research on political thinking Scholars since Plato and Aristotle have asked themselves many questions about the intriguingly political nature of the human mind. It is unlikely, however, that many have asked themselves whether political thinking is like riding a bicycle. This isn't altogether surprising, of course, given that casting a vote and pedaling down the road seem like very different behaviors. Beneath this surface dissimilarity, however, in many circumstances political thinking and bike riding may depend on flexing a common set of mental muscles. These muscles support the formation and expression of habits across a variety of domains (Lieberman, 2000). Three characteristics of habitual behaviors suggest striking parallels between riding a bike on the one hand and political decision-making and attitude expression on the other. First, both can become routinized and automatic with behavioral repetition. This automaticity leads to the second parallel – once formed, it is difficult to explain exactly how these habitual behaviors operate. Just as it is difficult to consciously access and describe the coordinated movements that underlie riding a bike, the bases for decision-making in many domains become less accessible to conscious inspection over time. Third, the fact that we have imperfect introspective access to the mechanisms supporting habitual behaviors means that we can lose sight of the forces that trigger and guide their automatic expression. Decades of social psychological research, in fact, have documented myriad ways in which thoughts, preferences, and attitudes are influenced by subtle contextual factors, prior habitual thought patterns, and current mood (Anderson et al., 1988; Chaiken, Liberman, & Eagly, 1989; Forgas, 1995; Iyengar, 1997; Miller, 1991; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986; Rogers et al., 1997; Wegner & Bargh, 1998). In like fashion, many factors that Cognitive Neuroscience and Political Attitudes 4 shape the way we ride a bike, including tire size and inflation, handle-bar position, the weather and terrain, all can change how we ride, but may do so without any blip on our conscious radar. But here is where the parallels end. In the case of riding a bicycle, most would realize that we can't easily or accurately explain, "exactly how" we manage to roll down the road without falling. Indeed, anyone who has tried to teach another person how to ride knows how poor explanations of habit can be. In the case of political thinking, however, and the expression of thoughts, preferences, and attitudes more generally, people often are unaware of how little insight they have into their own decision-making processes. In other words, they don’t know what they don’t know. The experimental literature on introspection has shown time and again that people confidently generate post-hoc narrative accounts of the thinking that supposedly went into a behavior, even when their behavior can be demonstrated to be driven by factors outside their conscious awareness (Gazzaniga, 1995; Nisbett & Wilson, 1977). Thus, behavior is often driven by automatic mechanisms, which leads self-report of mental processes to be notoriously unreliable and susceptible to many forms of contamination (Bem, 1967; Wilson & Brekke, 1994). With this discussion of habit in mind, the importance of bike riding for political thinking becomes apparent in at least two ways. First, it suggests that a fruitful means for understanding the processes underlying various kinds of political thinking may come through the application of methods and theories used to understand mental habits in general. Second, it suggests that traditional research methods in this domain, which typically rely on self-report surveys, might not be able to provide a full explanation of political attitudes, beliefs, and decision-making. This is not to suggest that models of political thinking that emphasize either deliberate choice or the complete lack thereof (Achen, 1975; Converse, 1964) are incorrect. Rather, we mean that an Cognitive Neuroscience and Political Attitudes 5 alternative approach to traditional models may take as its starting point the notion that there are numerous mechanisms of attitude construction and decision-making some of which are conscious and deliberative, and some of which are nonconscious and habitual. On this account, exciting directions in political attitude research can involve determining (a) the computational properties of each of these mechanisms, (b) when each mechanism is likely to be invoked, (c) how these mechanisms interact with one another, and (d) how the properties of these mechanisms and their interactions change with increasing political sophistication. In this paper we take a stab at providing just this sort of account of political attitudes. In so doing, we hope to show how the methods and theories of cognitive neuroscience might be used to carve political attitude mechanisms at their proverbial joints (Ochsner & Lieberman, 2001). We begin by reviewing issues in the political attitude and political sophistication literatures with an eye towards the ways in which they represent expressions of cognitive habits. Next, we consider the way in which cognitive neuroscience theory can be used to generate hypotheses about the mechanisms underlying political behavior by 1) describing how different forms of memory provide the blocks out of which different types of attitudes may be built, and 2) presenting a reflection-reflexion model of behavioral control that describes how these building blocks combine in the construction of various forms of social – and in this case, political – cognition (Lieberman, 2002; Lieberman, Gaunt, Gilbert, & Trope, 2002). We then move from the abstract to the concrete by suggesting ways in which neuroscience methods, and in particular functional imaging, can be used to test hypotheses about political behavior. We conclude with discussion of important concerns for researchers who already have, or are about to have, embarked upon investigating the neural bases of the political mind. Habitual Cognition: The Power Behind Two Types of Political Thinking Cognitive Neuroscience and Political Attitudes 6 Political Attitudes Assessing political attitudes through voting is at the very core of any democratic society. Similarly, politicians, activists, and the media survey the public relentlessly in order that the will of the people can be known. Many assume that these votes and survey responses reflect the actual beliefs, desires, and intentions of the public. Converse (1964) turned this assumption on its head when he suggested that for the most part, people do not have political attitudes at all and essentially perform a mental coin flip when answering surveys. He provided evidence that there is surprisingly little consistency in the survey responses given at different times by the same individuals. As this viewpoint is anathema to democratic values it is not surprising that Converse’s work has led to a stream of reinterpretations and alternative accounts of political attitudes. Achen (1975), in a move reminiscent of Brunswik’s Lens model of decision making (1956), suggested that political attitudes are quite stable and that the instability of survey responses arises primarily from measurement error and item ambiguity. That is, if the form of survey items does not match the form of stored attitudes, difficulties in mentally translating from one to the other may account for different attitude reports at different times. By this account, the attitudes themselves are stable, but the ability for survey items to tap those attitudes is not. Achen suggested that measurement error should lead to reduced correlations between separate assessments that do not vary with the inter-assessment interval, whereas instability in the attitudes themselves should result in correlations that decrease with increasing inter-assessment intervals. Achen provided data to support the former view. More recently, Zaller (1990; Zaller & Feldman, 1992) has taken a more social cognitive view of political attitude assessment. He has suggested that most people have multiple Cognitive Neuroscience and Political Attitudes 7 considerations (i.e., facts and beliefs that could be considered) that are potentially relevant to most survey items. What varies from time to time is which considerations are accessible (Higgins & King, 1981) to consciousness at the moment that an attitude must be provided. Thinking takes effort and consequently most of the time individuals make judgments based on the information that comes easily to mind without conducting an exhaustive search of memory for all relevant knowledge and beliefs. This type of “lite” thinking (Gilbert, 1989) has been referred to as heuristic (Chaiken, Liberman, & Eagly, 1989; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974), peripheral (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986) or pseudodiagnostic (Trope & Liberman, 1996). In contrast, thinking that invokes a more exhaustive search for relevant information has been referred to as systematic (Chaiken, Liberman, & Eagly, 1989), central (Petty & Cacioppo), or diagnostic (Trope & Liberman, 1996). Heuristic thought allows conflicting considerations to go unnoticed unless the conflicting considerations are each highly accessible at the same moment. Depending on current goals, recent mental activity, and the structure of the survey items, different considerations are likely to be active at different times leading to different attitude responses without any changes in the enduring dispositions and mental representations in the mind of the respondent. Recently, Lieberman and colleagues have argued that conscious heuristic cognition and nonconscious habit cognition (i.e., akin to bicycling, described above) can often lead to similar outputs, though not without important differences (Lieberman, et al., 2002). In both cases, recent goals, thoughts, and contexts will bias the attitude construction process. However, having the cognitive resources and motivation to be accurate and accountable will affect the extent to which conscious attitude construction is heuristic or systematic, but these factors should not affect the role of habit cognition (Wegner & Bargh, 1998). Furthermore, nonconscious judgment Cognitive Neuroscience and Political Attitudes 8 processes tend to be more affective than conscious heuristic processes. Whereas conscious heuristic processes can be influenced by affect (Damasio, 1994; Forgas, 1995), nonconscious judgment processes are evaluative or affect-based at their core. Finally, the extent to which nonconscious habit cognition can easily generate a coherent response will affect the likelihood that conscious cognition occurs at all, whether heuristic or systematic. For the most part, conscious cognition is only set into motion when other aspects of nonconscious cognition sound an alarm that something has gone awry (Whitehead, 1911). For example, when nonconscious habit cognition cannot accommodate the conflicting considerations activated in response to a survey item, the brain has a mechanism for sounding an alarm that will engage conscious cognition. Consequently, the number of conflicting considerations accessible for the individual, and the degree to which the neural networks can temporarily smooth over these conflicts, will play a major part in determining which mental mechanism(s) contribute to the reported attitude. Political Sophistication Political sophistication is the process of gaining and ultimately possessing expertise in one or more domains of political thinking, and it also may play an important part in how both conscious and nonconscious mechanisms of attitude generation operate. Political sophistication has been a central topic for democratic institutions for centuries. Federalists such as Alexander Hamilton were against the notion of all citizens voting in elections because they believed that most people lacked the requisite expertise to make informed decisions (Wright, 1996). Only those who are politically sophisticated were thought to be reliable consumers of political issues and thus in a position to make meaningful decisions. Unlike Converse (1964), Hamilton presumably believed reliable attitudes exist and could be developed, but only by some of the people some of the time. In many ways this view is even more abhorrent to a democratic Cognitive Neuroscience and Political Attitudes 9 society, and yet many would admit there is a grain of truth to Hamilton’s position. When the topic is shifted from politics to virtually any other domain, most are quite willing to hand the decision making over to experts. We allow wine stewards to choose bottles for us, a panel of judges to choose our figure skating champions, and weathermen to make sense of satellite data. In each case, many will disagree with particular decisions made by experts but few would prefer to turn the decision-making process over to the masses. It is unlikely that we would have more accurate weather forecasts if the forecasts were made by having everyone cast a vote. The reason we leave these decisions in the hands of the judges is at least threefold. First, there is the simple issue of pragmatics. Collecting everyone’s vote on each bottle of wine would be difficult to implement fairly, time consuming, and prohibitively expensive. Second, and more importantly, there are essential features of wine appreciation that must be learned systematically with practice and guidance. Experts’ sensory representations of wine are more differentiated and their linguistic representations of taste are more in line with the actual features that determine taste (Solomon, 1990, 1997). Many of these important factors are likely to be lost on the novice wine taster. Research by Wilson and colleagues (Wilson et al., 1993; Wilson & Schooler, 1991) suggests that when novices have to provide explicit reasons for their preferences, they tend to focus on features that are easily described in words rather than the features that contribute to their natural preferences. Indeed, novices later regretted their preferences if they had originally been required to express them linguistically. Third, experts ideally are trained to dispassionately make distinctions based on objective considerations rather than ideological, national, or personal considerations. Although in exceptional circumstance judges may be swayed by bribes or love of country, their training and experience may enable them to focus on the 'facts,' more so than a