Who do you think “won”? That’s always the question after any presidential debate, especially since the historic Nixon vs. JFK debate made such a lasting impression coming into homes with what was then the unrealized power of television.
Nowadays it’s not the power of television that is unknown; it’s the question of attracting a large enough audience to sway undecided voters. It will take a few days to determine the size of the audience on Friday night. According to the Associated Press, “The standard was set in 1980, when 80.6 million people watched that campaign’s only debate between President Jimmy Carter and Republican challenger Ronald Reagan. TV audiences that big typically gather only once a year, for the Super Bowl.”
If you scan as many news stories as I have since the debate, it appears there is no clear winner. If you read announcements from the candidates’ websites, both McCain and Obama won — but don’t they always make that claim, even if the media had crowned a “winner”?
I did run across some information about people’s habits that made me pause. According to MSNBC, a study conducted using Bush and Kerry statements from the 2004 election determined, in essence, that if you are emotionally tied to an issue, your brain doesn’t recognize opposing information. “We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning,” said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University. “What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts.”
Yikes. That means our own brains short-circuit our ability to reason when emotions are involved, and we all know how passionate we get about issues. Searching further, I ran across a review of On Being Certain, by neurologist Robert Burton. Bear with me, because the following description is worth the read:
Burton challenges the notions of how we think about what we know. He shows that the feeling of certainty we have when we “know” something comes from sources beyond our control and knowledge. In fact, certainty is a mental sensation, rather than evidence of fact. Because this “feeling of knowing” seems like confirmation of knowledge, we tend to think of it as a product of reason. But an increasing body of evidence suggests that feelings such as certainty stem from primitive areas of the brain, and are independent of active, conscious reflection and reasoning. The feeling of knowing happens to us; we cannot make it happen.
Hmmm. Will watching these debates change anybody’s mind? It sounds like if you are already convinced your candidate or issue is the right one, then no, but if you’re undecided, possibly. Burton suggests saying “I believe” rather than “I know.” Well, I believe that getting out the vote is the key to any candidate’s success, and I know I’m going to do my best to, if nothing else, try to get information out to undecided voters that will help them make a more informed decision.
Thank you, Lisa, for rising above the too common comments about politics and political issues based on emotions rather than facts. Having been a patisan by membership only one year of my life, I try to listen and read about multiple positions on issues. I have to admit that when I was young, my voting reflected the common attitudes of where I was living. I am not proud of some of those votes, but they are probably why I am now an independent.
The AAUW website has been very helpful in following voting records on issues that its members care so much about. That has led me to check voting records like the Sierra Club and the National Education Association as well as other non-partisan sites like the League of Women Voters, Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, etc.
Keep up the great work!