Bélanger JJ. Bélanger JJ. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2021 Apr 12;376(1822):20200144. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2020.0144. Epub 2021 Feb 22. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2021. PMID: 33612004 Free PMC article. Review. The association with President Kennedy was instrumental to the emotional appeal of the ad. Kennedy was an American icon, whose brief tenure in the White House is widely remembered as a time in which America's hopes soared along with its space programme. Careful dissection of the sequence of visual images shows how brilliantly the ad was crafted. De Vos, J. (2009). On cerebral celebrity and reality TV. Subjectivity in times of brain-scans and psychotainment. Configurations, 17(3), 259–293. Instead of dwelling on this dramatic finding and elaborating on why today's us-against-them mentality in politics is killing our democracy and bigger goals (like truth), Westen spends the majority of the book showing how Republicans use emotion to manipulate the populace and how Democrats should use emotion also--not to manipulate constituents' minds--but to reveal the valid points Democrats are trying to get across.

The vision of the mind that has captured the imagination of philosophers, cognitive scientists, economists and political scientists since the 18th century - a dispassionate mind that makes decisions by weighing the evidence and reasoning to the most valid conclusions - bears no relation to how the mind and brain actually work. I do not know how much of this was consciously intended by Clinton and his consultants. I suspect that much of it was, although some of the emotional overtones and sequencing of images might well have simply reflected Clinton's extraordinary emotional intelligence and gut-level, implicit political horse sense. Bush: "Look, this is a man who has great numbers. He talks about numbers. I'm beginning to think not only did he invent the internet, but he invented the calculator. It's fuzzy math."The inherent challenge—and exciting promise—of political psychology and neuroscience is the task of investigating an endlessly intricate organ (the brain) in wildly diverse social contexts (the arena of ideologies). These complexities naturally compound each other, rendering a robust psychological science of ideologies and political behaviour both challenging and crucial. The rapid spread of misinformation propagated by digital media as well as pronounced tribalistic polarization within and between national entities has provoked a global sense that our understanding of the origins of voting behaviour and ideological worldviews is dangerously insufficient. While the study of political attitudes and behaviour has been traditionally confined to the social sciences, new advances in political neuroscience and computational cognitive science highlight that the biological sciences may offer crucial insights about political and ideological behaviour. Ideological behaviour can be defined as behaviour that is epistemically dogmatic and interpersonally intolerant towards non-adherents or non-members [ 1]. In other words, a person thinking or behaving ‘ideologically' is rigidly adhering to a doctrine, resisting credible evidence when forming opinions, and selectively antagonistic to individuals who do not follow their ideological group or cause. Ideological behaviour can therefore occur in the realm of politics, religion, gender, race, class, social media or any other area of life where social conditions are described and accordingly actions are narrowly prescribed, resulting in ingroups and outgroups. The sequence began with Kennedy by himself, looking young, vibrant, serious and presidential - precisely the features the Clinton campaign wanted to associate with Clinton. Then came the video of a young Bill Clinton shaking hands with Kennedy, dramatically bringing the theme of the American dream to viewers' eyes - a poor boy from Arkansas without a father finding himself in the presence of his hero - while creating a sense of something uncanny, of "fate", of the chance meeting of once and future presidents that seemed too accidental not to be preordained. Then came a still photo of their hands tightly clasped, emphasising the connection between the two men. This image lasted far longer than any other in the ad and gradually expanded until the two hands panned out into an image of the two recognisable figures. We presented partisans with six sets of statements involving clear inconsistencies by Kerry, six by Bush, and six by politically neutral male figures (e.g., Tom Hanks, William Styron). Although many of the statements and quotations were edited or fictionalized, we maximized their believability by embedding them in actual quotes or descriptions of actual events. We can hear the whirring of the dispassionate mind in the following exchange on Medicare, which occurred during the first presidential debate between Gore and Bush in 2000:

The fact that he was from Massachusetts was well known - the Republicans were already emphasising that he was "Ted Kennedy's junior senator" - and the phrase "Massachusetts liberal" had become so successfully branded by the Republicans in the 1988 Bush-Dukakis campaign that either word readily evoked the other.

Develop

Metacognition is dissected further by Rollwage & Fleming [ 7], who use simulation-based modelling to demonstrate that metacognitive insight modulates the adaptiveness of confirmation bias. Agents with accurate metacognitive skills can in fact benefit from biased information processing, suggesting that confirmation bias itself may only be deleterious for individuals who also have a metacognitive impairment. Metacognitive ability may thus be a useful locus for interventions aiming to reduce dogmatism and belief polarization. Hibbing, J. R. (2013). Ten misconceptions concerning neurobiology and politics. Perspectives on Politics, 11(02), 475–489. While reasoning about apparent contradictions for their own candidate, partisans showed activations throughout the orbital frontal cortex, indicating emotional processing and presumably emotion regulation strategies. There also were activations in areas of the brain associated with the experience of unpleasant emotions, the processing of emotion and conflict, and judgments of forgiveness and moral accountability.