Do You KNOW Who You're Voting For?

How human development and use of knowledge impacts 2016 voter preferences

Photo Credit: PBS

For everyone, the clear 2016 Presidential candidate choice in the upcoming election is: ________. Wait. Didn’t each of the candidates in this election have a lead in the polls at least once? Haven’t Trump and Clinton each stayed stably close to 50% of the electorate all season? That must mean somehow Americans have divergent knowledge on the quality of the candidates. The word knowledge has many philosophical definitions and colloquial uses but for the purposes of this blog post it will be considered a degree of certainty about your own thoughts such that they confidently inform your behavior. The nuance of this definition can be explained in psychological terms as being rooted in past experience, emotional reactions (affect coding), learned and innate attention, cognitive maps or mental images, and interpretations - which are one way of creating new knowledge. Specifically for the dilemma at hand of Trump vs Clinton (and yes I am ignoring the existence of third party candidates), voter preferences may come down to where their attention was placed, how they perceived certain statements or behaviors, how the candidates addressed issues their target audience have developed the largest mental maps for, and how these pieces may come together to create a behavior in November. It is likely that the fuzzy intersections of each of these cognitive channels work together to intuitively guide a decision. 

Let’s begin with what voters from either main party are paying attention to, and why. It was established early on this election season that Trump voters were drawn to his behavior, his attitude, and his business ‘success’, and not necessarily unified on his issue platform, if they took note of it at all. I’m going to classify the aspects of Trump support that are based on violence or extreme emotional salience as involuntary fascination. Trump’s violent body language (throwing his fists around, falling his arms, hovering behind Clinton), loud, disrespectful, interrupting, and displays of power should draw anyone’s attention. Should because these are all types of threats, threats signal danger, and humans are involuntarily fascinated by what fear-invoking stimuli. When the alt-right actually does listen to what he has to say, learned attention comes into play. Fear of the other, invoked in references to a wall with Mexico, ISIS, ‘inner-city’ and .… birther-ism (I had to). These fears line up with established demographic information and self reported attitudes among Trump supporters, who are predominately white, well off voters in highly homogeneous locations. Hillary Clinton supporters are using learned attention to keep a focus on her as well. Through education and experience they have learned to attend to issues of poverty, taxation, health care, clean energy, LGBT rights, and the big one - feminism. For voters with a cognitive map of feminism, it is likely that the mere fact that a woman is running for president has activated this map and can be used to make predictions about what a female president might do for the efforts of feminism at large. Her behavior also activates cognitive maps for what an articulate, calm, self-contained presidential candidate should be, but this should not be involuntarily fascinating because it is not an indicator of threat (or natural beauty, sexuality, shining objects, or wild animals which also happen to be involuntarily fascinating stimuli but are not relevant in comparisons of presidential candidates - save a few Trumpisms). 

Now you might be wondering, if Trump’s speech and behavior invoke fear, why would that fear draw voters in rather than scare them away? After all anxiety exists as a quick evolutionary signal to avoid. If you catch a glimpse of a lion in the bushes, feel fear, and run from it (or perhaps in organisms that descended from the trees, climb up to safety). But what if you grew up with pet lions, and raised them all your life from cubs? Would you be afraid of lions or would you see them as familiar, friendly, and good company? And how would you characterize the lion’s behavior? Dangerous or cute? What if you grew up with Trump, or someone even remotely like him? Anyone habituated with Trump’s behavior through personal experience would be less caught up by and averse to it, leaving them more time to focus on issues they find relevant. Similarly anyone habituated to Clinton’s behavior would relate to it and listen to her points instead. 

In evolutionary behavioral psychology terms, these repeated experiences form internal representations for, say, argument style and emotion regulation that get simplified over successive exposures. These simplified internal representations, when activated, take up some space in the brain’s channel capacity, or the amount of the brain that can be accessed at any one time, to come together in an individual’s cognitive map of something larger, say Trump or Clinton as a whole. Cognitive maps themselves are simplified as an individual builds expertise so that, perhaps for a political scientist, the understanding of Clinton or Trump as candidates gets demoted to the role of an internal representation when contemplating the global politics instead. It may be relevant to note here that unfamiliar stimuli (in comparison to fear-invoking stimuli) also produce discomfort and avoidance. If it is true that people who are like Trump like Trump and people who are like Clinton like Clinton, then it is also true that the inverse is not true. People who are like Trump are not also like Clinton. So then, to Trump supporters, Clinton is an outsider sparking fear and avoidance and for Clinton supporters vice versa. 

Which ever demeanor is more familiar to the individual, it is likely an emotional response will be attached to it like, when Trump gets angry it reminds you of your father and you have a positive association of your father (most people do, even if they are as volatile as he, because of the way early attachment works), so you have a favorable opinion of Trump. Or your mother may have been well educated or generally held in high esteem in your family and you see those same qualities in reverence to Clinton. Whatever emotions they draw out of your preconceptions, those emotions will be stored in the cognitive map of each candidate in a form of affect coding to add to the knowledge of him or her. 

 

Can you recognize the presidential candidates? Chances are, by this time in the election season, you have become so expert at recognizing the outline of Clinton and Trump’s faces that it takes very little detail to point them out. The “C” and “T” help, as well as this caption, but those details are fair game because internal representations and mental models are formed from any type of experience you have connected to describe your object or idea. 

Tying it all together, previous experience and the focus of your attention actually determine what you are able to perceive. In the case of experience, you have to understand racism and sexism to notice them in Trump. On the other side of things, a deep bias against perhaps one of Trump’s most tactful ploys in the second presidential debate was following and hovering behind Clinton in a hostile way because fear of him and for her in that situation distracted away from what she was saying. This touches on the famous Monkey Business Illusion where subjects asked to count how many times a basket ball was passed between members of two groups were unable to notice the man in a gorilla suit who casually strolled through center stage. However, pervious exposure of the Monkey Business Illusion would allow viewers to perceive the monkey but not, perhaps, an unexpected change in curtain color. Previous experience is necessary for perception, especially if attention is directed at a particular stimulus, and in the absence of it what should seem like obvious details are not perceived. 

The Monkey Business Illusion

Come November, what voters are able to recognize in each candidate and how it fits into their cognitive maps of the issues facing the country will determine their behavior. It’s not an entirely conscious process. Humans acquire information about their environments to build internal representations and cognitive maps continuously and dependent on what they are exposed to. When key pillars of these systems are developed at an early age, like how your dad acts, it’s even less conscious of a process and more likely to slip into your cognitive maps unnoticed to form an expectation of how the world works, what to attend to, how people should act, etc. These pillars, along with the smorgasbord of topic related cognitive maps known as election issues each candidate brings to the table, will blend together intuitively as what the voter knows and feels is best to decide their vote.