Mad Skills: Speaking to the Lizard Brain

In a brilliant article published in Alternet, Joshua Holland reported on recent scientific research into how human cognitive functions make it possible to support sexist and racist policies; or how “ordinary people come to embrace Paul Ryan’s Cruelty.”  Holland writes,

“Even more frustrating for those who view politics as a rational pursuit of one’s self-interest, facts don’t actually matter that much. We begin evaluating policies emotionally, according to a deeply ingrained moral framework, and then our brains often work backward, filling in – or inventing — “facts” that conform to that framework…

Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman refined earlier theories about how the brain functions on two levels – one instinctive and very quick, the other slower and more deliberate. He described the first as intuitive processing, or “system one cognition,” and the other as a process of reasoning, or “system two cognition.”

  And the key point here is it appears that when system one is active, system two shuts down. Or, to put it another way, when we perceive an issue in emotional terms (system one), we make a quick judgment in which we don’t think much about the details. This is common in our daily lives, but takes on real significance in our political culture, and while this tendency isn’t limited to a particular ideology, some research suggests that political conservatives are more likely to rely on the kind of snap judgments associated with system one cognition than liberals.

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Perhaps because I was accused just last week of grossly overreacting to something*, I read this article and thought, YES!  Finally, my deft feminine skill at producing hormone-fueled responses to life and politics may be of some use to the progressive political machinery.  Emote first, think later.  Women were made for this!

Satire aside, there’s a lesson in this for feminist and otherwise progressive politics.  It’s not just ok to choose the terrain upon which we fight our political battles – it may be in our best interest to think outside the box and appeal to more than just rational reasoning.  In one of my favorite examples of creative political activism, in 1991 members of ACT-UP famously responded to homophobic and HIV-phobic politicking by right-wing extremist Jesse Helms by covering Helms’ house with a giant condom and the words “Helms is deadlier than a virus.”  He was humiliated by relentless evening news coverage of the event, and according to members who worked on the action, Helms never passed another life-threatening AIDS amendment again.

Talk about a massive…emotional overreaction.  With deepest admiration, I can say that The Condom Incident looks more like the agonized revenge of a woman scorned than a strategic move by a group of brilliant activists.  The thing is, as members of the group commented later, it was both.  They were angry and smart, emotional and calculating.

And it worked.  Sexist lizard brains beware: we’re out to get you, and we’ve got science on our side.

*  In this case, ‘overreacting’ meant calmly saying that if a (now ex) gentleman friend kept needing to cancel on me in order to work, I’d rather just not make plans.  I would put this well within the category of normal-reacting, but whatevs.  Tomato…tomaaato.