Human Affect in theVJestern Tradition 13 Chapter'. Human Affect in the Western Tradition For thousands of years in the Western world, we have believed that emotion is an unpredictable response to life's events, incompatible with intelligent judgment. —Richard S. and Beatrice N. Lazarus, Passion and Reason: Making Sense of Our Emotions The nature, causes and consequences of the emotions are among the least well understood aspects of human behavior. —Ion Eister, Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences To be passionate about politics \is\ to be some kind of nut. —Ira Roseman, Robert P. Abelson, and Michael F. Ewing, "Emotions and Political Cognition: Emotional Appeals in Political Communication" The ancient Greek philosopher Anaxagoras, advisor to Pericles, suddenly finds himself in a modern American academic library. He sits down to read up on what humankind has learned about democratic politics in the two and a half millennia since his day. He is surprised and a bit disappointed to discover that the analysis and political rhetoric sound strikingly familiar. It is not that we haven't learned a few things. The technologies are new and amazing. Economics has come a long way. But the basic conceptions of citizen deliberation, political dialogue, and democratic participation have survived in surprisingly familiar form. His doctrine of Nous, the concept of the rational mind that inspired Plato and Aristotle and became the cornerstone of Stoicism, the ideal of rational control over emotional impulses, would also influence Roman philosophy, medieval Christianity, and the Puritans, among others, in American political culture. That is a pretty long run for a fundamental idea. Indeed, it has become so deeply embedded and widely accepted that it is rarely challenged. We intuitively sense the tension between the emotional demands of our bodies and the socialized values of our "rational" minds. We deal with our successes and failures in what we often interpret as a battle of mind versus body. The primacy of rationality may be so well accepted that it appears to us jn Western culture as axiomatic. But Anaxagoras would do well to read a little further in modern physiology and neuroscience to discover the beginnings of a new understanding. Increasingly in recent years, research on the functioning of the brain rejects these deeply ingrained notions and concludes that they dramatically distort our understanding of how thinking and feeling really interact (Damasio 1994; Gray 1987b; LeDoux 1996). As we begin to outline a theory of Affective Intelligence, we will take a brief look at the extraordinary perseverence of fundamental beliefs about passion and politics throughout the evolution of Western thinking. We will identify a number of recurring themes in philosophy and literature that manifest the tension between emotion and rational thought and briefly demonstrate the continuing resonance and influence of these ideas in modern political science research. The Paradox of the Present It is easy to make fun of primitive ideas and misconceptions of our forebears. We remark with curiosity about the fervent belief in a flat earth, in the power of magic spells, and in the existence of various ethers and spirits. Science and human understanding have come a long way. But they had already come a long way in the nineteenth century when bloodletting was still common and the science of phrenology, based on the belief that bumps on the skull revealed detailed information about underlying brain functions, was widely popular. Bloodletting, the medical practice of extracting blood to purge the body of excessive bad "humors," had been practiced for centuries. Although today it is demonstrably detrimental to the health of already weakened patients, to medical science of earlier days it made intuitive sense. Indeed, George Washington was probably killed by the excessive bloodletting he received after coming down with fever following a rainy ride. Not all patients so treated died. It was thought necessary that they get worse before they get better. Unfortunately, it was also believed that the more serious the health problem, the greater the need for even more heroic bloodletting. Is it possible that similar misconceptions continue to persist in present-day medical, political, social, and economic practices? Of course they o. But by definition, they do not appear that way to our modern eye. That ls the paradox of the present. Our sense of the world around us is itself socially constructed. As Walter Lippmann put it, it is not that we see and then understand; we understand first, and then see. So our present inquiry is Chapter Two more than an instructive digression. We need to better understand the roots of Western conceptions of affect and intelligence to be able to take advantage of the latest advances of understanding in neuroscience. Human Affect in the Western Tradition f mental functioning. The Mesopotamians were convinced that cal source ^ ^ ^ produced liver-shaped religious liver was totems. The Culturally Embedded Concepts of Affect and Intelligence The word emotion is derived from the Latin e and movere, meaning to set in motion, to motivate, or to be in a state of agitation or perturbation. So the idea of arousal and stimulation are reflected in the etymology of "emotion." But more importantly, for most of the common era the term typically used to identify the political impact of affect has been passion, derived from the Latin pari, meaning to suffer or endure, and related to the Greek pathos, or suffering. These roots are reflected in such modern English words as passive, patient, sympathy, empathy, and pathetic. It might seem odd that these two central root words have contrasting meanings of activity and passivity. But the two reflect the fundamental tension between affect and intelligence that is a central theme in Western cultural heritage. To be passionate is to be gripped, seized, or possessed by primordial forces beyond one's rational control. Thus it is hard to imagine thoughtful actions resulting from a passionate state. We see this understanding reflected in the special mitigating and aggravating circumstances of "crimes of passion" that the legal system invokes for juries to assess in weighing such crimes. Western literature and poetry resonate with numerous variations on passion as madness or intoxication. The character Acrasia in Edmund Spenser's (1989 (1590]) Faerie Queene was the personification of uncontrolled passion that transformed her captive lovers into monstrous shapes. Spenser's choice of character names was no doubt playing off the Greek akrasia, lack of self-control. The term acracy for out of control or out of balance came into use later in medieval medicine. Madness itself was defined by medieval physicians as an imbalance of the four elements of fire, air, water, and earth in the body's humors. The misunderstandings of human physiology and biochemistry in Hippocrates and Galen were passed down to guide medical practice for sixty generations virtually without challenge or refinement. Treatments included magic spells, primitive medications, and dietary regimes. A medical treatment introduced by Asclepiades in the first century prescribed long baths and copious wine and was revived periodically in various forms as late as the eighteenth century in response, we would assume, to the understandable enthusiasm of many generations of patients. At least the Greeks had identified the brain as the physiologi- Enduring Oppositions One enduring principle throughout this cultural progression of evolving scientific understanding was the ideal of keeping emotions "under control." Controlling Emotion Psychologist Carroll Izard's seminal The Face of Emotion (1972) builds its argument in part on an historical analysis. He traces two themes that have continued from the time of the Greeks, the denial of the importance of emotion and culturally reinforced norms of emotional control. Izard finds that in the celebration of the ideal of human rationality from the Greeks to the modern Age of Reason, humankind has unintentionally and systematically distorted the meaning and significance of human emotion. He calls this the "rational man ideology," a collection of beliefs and values codified in socialization practice and passed on from generation to generation. It represents, he argues, a fundamental misconception of potentially devastating consequence. These socialization practices emphasize the importance of personal characteristics, skills, concepts and purposes mistakenly thought to be pure functions of intelligence or cognition. They de-emphasize or deny any important function to the emotions. In general, psychologists and non-psychologists alike view the emotions as transient and troublesome states serving no really important purpose. . . . The rational man ideology has succeeded in hiding man from his full nature. (Izard 1972, 396) Izard takes particular interest in cultural practices that attempt to manipulate conscious control of the striate muscle system as a means of emotional control—a practice reflected in such admonitions as "keep a stiff upper lip" and "keep your chin up." Diverse religious beliefs and socialization practices worldwide assert that willpower combined with focused control of the voluntary muscles is the key to emotional maturity, *hich indicates how widespread, if not universal, such an outlook is. These ideas are sustained today in serious therapeutic approaches to mental illness (Pesso 1969; Pesso and Crandell 1990). A central idea throughout is Chapter Two opposition—the raging emotions misdirecting, distracting, and misleading the mind that if only left alone could more properly make sound decisions. Not surprisingly, Western society developed ideals that emphasize the need for sustained willpower to focus attention on thoughtful consideration of valued goals and for training to overpower the distractions of emotion. Emotion and Institutions of Constraint Another enduring theme is that the power of emotion is perhaps most obvious and dangerous when it is public. Echoing the medieval skepticism about unrestrained human nature, emphasis is placed on the central importance of norms and institutions. This is a view not just held by conservatives, but is also resonant within liberal perspectives (Bessette 1994; Holmes 1995). Le Bon's 1896 classic The Crowd, for example, founds its argument on the distinction between an unorganized and dangerously primordial crowd and the organized and norm-managed collectivities represented by modern institutions. The character of the crowd, Le Bon asserted, is "impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgment and the critical spirit, the exaggeration of the sentiments . . . —which are almost always observed in beings belonging to inferior forms of evolution—in women, savages, and children, for instance" (Le Bon 1986 [1896], 35-36). Le Bon's view, although characteristic of his time, reflect longstanding skepticism about pure democracy and the need for the collective constraints and cushioning effects of representative institutions. These are core elements of the theory of representative democracy. To Madison in Federalist 10, the evil of faction was defined as a group of citizens united by "common impulse of passion." The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man . .. human passions have in turn divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities that where no substantial occasion presents itself the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts. (Madison, Hamilton, and Jay 1961 [1787], 58-59) The cure for the human vice of faction and the zeal to which it is attached, Madison avers, is representative democracy and well-constructed union. Human Affect in the Western Tradition 7he Savage and the Civilized Citizen In understanding the social contract between the modern citizen and the odern state, we continue to draw on the philosophical underpinnings of hobbes Locke, and Rousseau. Although our philosophical forebears each had a different conception of life before the development of civilization, they recognized that social and political institutions evolved slowly and unevenly. But the notion of life in the wild without enforceable rules or central authority remains powerfully symbolic. In Hobbes' (1968 [1651]) classic description of that life, |t]here is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force-, no knowledge of the face of the earth; no accounting of time, no art; no letters; no society and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. (Hobbes 1968 [ 16511, 82) What makes this particularly relevant to our present inquiry is the notion of the state of nature evolving into the modern political state. We come to understand when the noises of the jungle must be constantly monitored for signs of threat and danger. We understand that those early humans who exhibited particularly sensitive skills at surveillance and the quick replacement of habitual behavior with attentive caution were more likely to survive and reinforce such behavioral patterns in the gene pool. In responding to the symbolic and political and economic behavior of the king or the president in succeeding years, the modern citizens continue to draw on their evolutionary and animal roots in balancing attention among the many stimuli that might call for attention and rational calculation.1 1. We have made repeated reference in these pages to the Western tradition of thought that tends to polarize emotion and cognition, as if they were locked in zero-sum opposition. While we wish to stress the prominence of that strain of thought, we do not mean to exaggerate its influence in intellectual history to the exclusion of enlightening and interesting exceptions. One thinks of lewish mysticism, elements of Christian theology and liturgy, and cultural romanticism in the nineteenth century, in each of which there is a celebration of the unique linkages between human emotion and cognition. Also, perhaps we would do well to acknowledge the influential conservative tradition characterized by Burke and Hume among many others who counseled reliance on emotionally grounded and historically evolved traditions in the calculation of political choice. Chapter Two Models of Political Emotion How might we make sense of this enduring thematic common to political philosophy, myth, and literature? In our discussion of the paradox of the present, we noted how easily we reject as naive our ancestors' understanding of the nature of the individual and our collective institutions. A flat earth and a geocentric universe make perfect sense to the unaided eye and dominated human understanding for millennia. The polar opposition of passion and reason makes similar intuitive sense. But it may well take several generations before research now on the frontiers of neuroscience becomes part of the fundamental norms and practices of our collective culture. Before proceeding with that aim, we take stock and attempt to outline the underlying cultural causes for the opposition of passion and reason so we might explicitly compare older and newer models in experimental, field, and survey research. Four Underlying Pathologies The mythologized battle between passion and reason in the Western tradition is an inventory of human psychopathology. As it was fashionable, from the seventeenth to the early-twentieth centuries to diagnose illness in women and children as some form of predictable hyperemotionality or hysteria, it remains fashionable today to characterize the subtle dynamics between different neurological systems in pathological terms. So the modern equivalent of a diagnosis of hysterical illness is the presumption that if the amygdala communicates with the cerebrum, bad things will happen. Characterized in this way, it sounds like a pretty primitive conceptualization of human psychology, which is indeed what we hope to show. But first let us analyze the presumed mechanisms of pathology that have developed in the course of the Western tradition. THE DISPLACEMENT PATHOLOGY The principal argument here is that emotionally charged inputs overstim-ulate the individual, distort judgment, and inhibit or displace reason and evaluation. Reasoning requires calm deliberation. Affect leads to impulsiveness and inconsiderate judgment, perhaps something like hysteria. Part of the mechanism presumed to be at work in this case is extremeness and imbalance. It is a common theme in the literature, the subtle equation of emotional input with extreme or overpowering emotional input. The metaphors tend to involve heat, overheating, boiling. One's blood boils; one is in the heat of passion; one blows one's top-, one is subject to Human Affect in the Western Tradition ;tinn With electricity came other metaphors—short-circuiting hot cogniLi'-1"-"„d blowing one's fuse. Another component of this hypothesized pathology is hurried judg-the absence of a calm consideration of alternatives. The common m raj soiutions of having a cooling-off period, of counting to ten, of C, ino on it and the like all speak to this element. Then there is the umed zero-sum relationship between affect and reason. The brain has limited capacity. Emotionality takes up capacity and suppresses or displaces cognitive functioning. A final element is the passivity of the individual in response to emotional stimuli. We don't consider emotional stimuli, we are in their grip; we are taken over by, or consumed by them. It is a one-way causal linkage between passion and reason. THE DISTRACTION PATHOLOGY The presumption here is that emotional symbols distract the mind from weighing relevant evidence and draw attention to irrelevant matters. Thus we are concerned in politics that emotional appeals draw attention to personal qualities rather than more meaningful political issues. Consider a debate or discussion among individuals in search of a collective decision. Participants ideally put forward their reasoned assessment of alternatives, their view of likely consequences, their sense of critical values at stake. A visceral approach, as the stereotype would have it, appeals to the heart rather than the head, to hot buttons (heat again), to vague symbols. The term ad hominem captures this presumption. The phrase refers to the logical fallacy in rhetoric when one argues "against the man," attacking the individual or individual characteristics rather than establishing pertinent fact. THE INTRANSIGENCE PATHOLOGY An emotionally charged stimulus is presumed to lead to such an extremity °f belief that the person is unwilling to compromise or to adjust their belief in the light of new information. Several mechanisms are seen to contribute to this phenomenon. One is that the intensity of belief and feeling preclude attentiveness to the arguments of the "other side." In the political world this is associated with conceptions of partisanship, fragmentation and polarization, and to identity Politics. Another is the notion that fixation on a particular issue becomes so 'ntense that it precludes attention to other issues, thus resulting in Chapter Two Human Affect in theWestern Tradition single-issue politics. Research on the psychology of ideology and authoritarianism is also relevant here. The strength of the organizing schema is so strong that all incoming information is distorted to fit the schema and, 0f course, compromise is characterized as selling out, lack of will, weakness and lack of principle. THE SELF-ABSORPTION PATHOLOGY It is presumed that individuals in a state of anxiousness and emotional arousal will rely heavily on instincts for base self-interest and primordial self-preservation and will emphasize these interests of the self over collective or sociotropic interests when evaluating political alternatives. This may be the least well developed of the four hypotheses. Basically it equates emotionality with desperation. The calm generosity of the well endowed who can afford to compromise when the spirit strikes them is contrasted with the anxiety of the critically impoverished. It harks back to Plato's observation that the thirsty man thinks of nothing but to quench his thirst. Emotionality is associated with basic issues of survival, the lowest level of Maslow's (1954) hierarchy of needs. Altruism is the-prerogative of only those who enjoy abundance. In reflecting on these four possible pathologies, several themes can be seen to recur, each of which will be addressed again in the pages ahead. One such theme is the conflation of emotion and extreme emotion. This is especially evident in displacement pathology but is present in different ways in each of the others. Extreme levels of any stimulus or even any habitual behavior can have pathological effects. It is important, however, to make sure our language and our analytic approach allow us to distinguish the phenomenon from its possible level of intensity. A second common theme is that there is a one-way causal influence from emotion to cognition. But much of the advances in neuroscience in recent years emphasizes the complexity and multidirectionality of synaptic communication within the brain, for example, the co-orientation of left and right hemispheres. As our understanding of neurophysiology deepens, we may be able to make more sense of how dynamic and complex these interactions between neural systems actually are. The one-way conception is also reflected in the notion of cognition as the passive and at times helpless recipient of emotional stimuli. A third common thematic is some level of confusion between state and trait, that is, between temporary and enduring phenomena. Most conceptions of an emotional state recognize that it is transitory, the immediate response to an emotional stimulus—thus such notions as temporary insanity. What is missing from the hypotheses is clear and testable mecha- that relate an immediate psychological state to longer term and enduring patterns of belief and cognition.2 Current Research on Political Choice In reading the modern literature of political science and political communication, we find a strong filtrate of the traditional Western polarization of emotion and cognition. Their presumed opposition permeates the normative conceptions of democratic process and citizenship, the measurement of political attitudes and behavior, and even the spatial modeling of rational political choice. We will return to these issues in the final chapter, but briefly highlight two examples here before turning to the underlying neuroscience of thinking and feeling. The first is the debate about citizen competence, the second is the spatial modeling of rational choice, both closely associated with the National Election Study series that we will explore in chapters 5 and 6. The Debate Over Citizen Competence and the Notion of the Normal Note For the last half century, the American National Election Studies initiated originally at the University of Michigan and now managed by an inter-university board have become the gold standard in the empirical study of the dynamics between voters, issues, and candidates. One central and enduring controversy about how citizens respond to and understand issues and candidates has focused on the levels of information and sophistication possessed by the typical voter. Philip Converse (1964) of the University of Michigan became a principal player and a bit of a scholarly lightning rod as the debate over citizen competence heightened. This literature is of special importance to us because it deals with political attentiveness, information processing, and voting calculus. The notion of habitual behavior is captured in the concept of the "normal vote," which posits a standing vote decision based on party affiliation and a dynamic process of possible party defection and rational calculation based on the short-term forces of candidate qualities and the current issue agenda. 2. Again, we do not wish to overclaim or weaken our case by reliance on a straw man. We identify here a set of recurring themes of pathology and opposition In our view they accurately reflect a very influential strain of Western thought. Of course, many scholars and philosophers over the years have recognized the awkwardness of the simplifying opposition and struggled both to understand it and transcend it. Perhaps the most thoughtful effort to explore the possibility of cooperation between emotion and reason are Hume's A Treatise on Human Nature (Hume 1739-40) and Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith 1959). These, and other views, are explored in Marcus forthcoming. Chapter Two Emotion plays two roles in the normal vote model. First, it is the f0 dation of the "long-term" forces, namely, the partisan affiliations forme" use. early in life that result in stable cues for contemporary and future Emotion, as used here, seems an example of the intransigence patho|c The stronger the partisan loyalty, the more committed are voters to the' historical attachments and the less they are willing to consider altern tives. Second, emotion serves as the basis of the "short-term" forces Les partisan and ironically generally less well-informed voters represent a swing vote, picking up on short-term candidate cues and current events In this case, emotion is modeled as a contemporary, though cursory, reaction to current political symbols and personalities rather than ideologically grounded issue positions. Short-term forces, thus depicted, represent an example of the displacement pathology—emotions serve as an alternative to judgment, if by judgment we mean a careful attentive and considered comparison of the available choices. The debate over citizen competence drew in large measure from Converse's disappointment at the initial discovery of a large number of voters who employed an unsophisticated and apolitical nature-of-the-times calculation in comparing Eisenhower and Stevenson as presidential candidates in 1956. "The economy is healthy, there is no foreign policy crisis, and we seem to have successfully extricated ourselves from Korea," this hypothetical voter calculated. "I'll stick with Ike." But what about issue calculations, the evaluations of conservative and liberal ideologies? A small army of survey researchers adjusted and reinterpreted estimates of measurement error, inter-item correlations, and open-ended utterances in an attempt to salvage the casually attentive voter from disparagement as incompetent (Ferejohn and Kuklinski 1990; Neuman 1986). But in ourview the original finding need not be characterized as contrary to democratic theory or as a challenge to the premise of citizen competence. Searching the political horizon for signs of novelty or threat, concluding they are absent, and relying on the status quo might be seen as a most reasonable calculation for a voter in 1956. The normal vote model is dynamic at the level of collective decision, but it lacks a parallel microlevel theory of voter psychology, attentiveness, and issue calculus. The brouhaha over citizen competence may be in part a victim of an unexamined legacy of polarized concepts of emotion and reason. Rational Choice Modeling—Emotion as an Endogenous Variable Another predominant perspective, as we have noted, is spatial and rational choice modeling of electoral behavior. Here a resolution to the persist- Human Affect in theVJestern Tradition of human affect is to simply define it as endogenous. We have ing"uisance wny the rational choice model is so influential, increasingly puzzled over.np_uence beyond neoclassical economics to sociology, po-exerting lts ^ gven psychology. We wonder why the rational choice Ijtical scienC.g's0 self-disciplined in consistently excluding affect-related perspective^ ^ moc|els. Four patterns are evident in this growing com-variable^frmocjern rational choice literature, each resonating in its own way 23 with the Western tradition of opposing rationality and emotions THEORETICAL PARSIMONY The argument here is that rational-choice style spatial models work pretty we|| Available data generally support the thesis of utility maximization. If it ain't broke, why complicate things unnecessarily? In the introduction to his text Public Choice, for example, economist Dennis Mueller (1979, 5) reviews the central tenets of the rational choice perspective and notes: To many political scientists the public choice models seem but a naive caricature of political behavior. The public choice theorist's answer to these criticisms is the same as the answer economists have given to the same criticisms as they have been raised against their "naive" models of economic behavior down through the years. The use of the simplified models of political behavior is justified so long as they outperform the competitors in explaining political behavior. Our interest focuses on the debate over possible refinement. Defenders of the faith tend to assert that attempting to add additional variables to account for institutions—like values and especially emotional states—muddies the water and actually reduces the scientific value of the modeling. Dennis Chong (1996), in a discussion of rational choice critics, asserts that rational choice theory cannot be set aside because of disconfirming facts, it can only be supplanted by a superior theory, which thus far, at least in his view, the critics lack. Or in Elster's (1986, 27) more direct summation of this viewpoint, "you can't beat something with nothing." Fiorina (1996), for example, argues that rational choicers should stick to their knitting, focusing on that subset of issues their tools are designed to address and avoiding such things as political psychology where they have, as he puts it, no comparative advantage. measurement difficulties Leave affect to the poets, the argument goes, they don't have to concern themselves with the replicable measurement of emotion and the assess- Chapter Two ment of its potential correlation with behavior. Economists traditional] are suspicious of individual explanations for personal behavior. Most of V are socialized to invent explanations for our behavior postthoc (Elster 1993s 14). Why waste time trying to make sense of these rationalisations when can focus on the behavior itself, or in Paul Samuelson's no\w famous choi^ of words, on "revealed preferences" (Sen 1973). Economises take seriou J the aphorism "Pay attention to what I say, not what I do" im reverse, and for the obvious reasons. Economists have no tools for investigating the origirns of the utilit functions they assess, and no taste for such an inquiry (Sirmon 1987) Such functions are givens, the products of a psychological blactk box. In part it contrasts the rational choicer's interest in outcome contrasted with the psychologist's fascination with process (Hogarth and Redegr 1987, 10) The rational choice tradition in political science emphasizes legislative and voting behavior rather than public opinion research (Chong 1996, 44) It is a natural outgrowth of its roots in economic modeling