Political Thinking: The Brain’s Timeline

----------------------------------------- BRAIN FACTS ------------------------------------------- 

The unconscious mind is estimated to process about 11 million bits of information per second when awake, about 10 million/second for sight, about 1 million/second for hearing and less for other senses. It does parallel processing and works with thousands or millions of memories, some or many of which are not accessible to consciousness.

By contrast, the conscious mind is estimated to be able to process about 1-500 bits of information per second, depending on the task at hand. Consciousness operates by serial processing and can work with an estimated 5-9 memories at one time, processing each independently of the others.

In their 2103 book, The Rationalizing Voter, political scientists Milton Lodge and Charles Taber posit a hypothesis about how people react to political content or information and then form beliefs. In describing their hypothesis, the John Q Public model of political thinking, the authors touch on the timeline the brain or mind operates on to form critically important initial reactions to politics-related inputs.

This helps put the nature political thinking into some context.

At time zero, information is perceived, usually something such as an image is seen, or words are heard. An example is the image in this picture, which is taken from a political ad that Mike Huckabee aired when he was running for president in 2008.

On seeing the image, the mind immediately but unconsciously recognizes the Christian cross in the shelf behind Huckabee.[1] That is time zero. Within about 300-400 milliseconds (~0.3 to 0.4 seconds), the brain has reacted emotionally and the unconscious mind has subjectively experienced the physiological emotion. Psychologists call the subjective experience being in an affective state.

The subjective experience to an emotion can be positive or negative, and strong, medium or weak (ambiguous). At about the same time and in the seconds thereafter, the unconscious mind gathers memories that it decides to place in our consciousness.

Becoming fully conscious of an input is a process that takes about 700-2500 milliseconds. The process starts at about 300-400 milliseconds, once the initial unconscious experience is well underway and maturing. Early on at about 300-400 milliseconds there is a vague consciousness with an experienced sense of positive and/or negative feeling. The authors call the mental state about 300 millisecond to fully conscious at about 1,000 to 2,500 milliseconds ‘preconsciousness’.

Lodge and Taber describe the process like this: “Most of this processing -- the establishment of affect, meaning and intentions -- is subterranean [unconscious, then unconscious and preconscious], each process following one upon the other in about a second of time. An inkling of conscious awareness begins 300-400 milliseconds after stimulus exposure with a felt sense of positive and/or negative feeling, followed by a rudimentary semantic understanding of the concept, both of which are based entirely on unconscious prior processes. People can report simple like-dislike judgments in about 500-800 milliseconds, and make simple semantic categorizations in about 700-1000 milliseconds, depending in part on whether on the priming context facilitates or inhibits comprehension. It takes somewhat longer (1,000-2,500 milliseconds) to provide a scaled response, and even longer to answer open-ended questions. Were we to ask a committed republican to evaluate Secretary of State Hillary Clinton using a simple like/dislike response, it would take about 700 milliseconds to hit the dislike button.”

Lodge & Taber’s mention of the priming context refers to things that make content easier or harder to comprehend. For example, it is easier to comprehend Mike Huckabee’s image with a Christian cross in the background, that it is to comprehend Donald Trump or Kim Jong Un with a Christian cross in the background. All sorts of things , both expected and unexpected, exert priming effects and that affects the time it takes to become fully conscious of political content, and how it is evaluated.

Long story short, unconscious thinking dominates how we perceive and think about political content, much of it happening in less than a second, which is generally before full but slow conscious reason can be brought to bear.

Footnote:
1. Huckabee claims the cross was not intended to be an appeal to Christian imagery. Professional political observers assert (i) it acts as a powerful stimulus on the way to forming opinion about the ad, whether Huckabee intended it or not, and (ii) Huckabee could not be so dense as to not realize exactly what we was doing and why. Playing these kinds of emotional tricks are well-known to all politicians (and marketers-persuaders in general), and if there are any exceptions, they are failures and need to find another day job.

B&B orig: 10/27/18