The Unknown Candidate: The Political Superbowl

Sunday, February 05, 2006

The Political Superbowl

Smells Like Team Spirit
By John Tierney
The New York Times

To understand what's wrong with politics today, take a good look during the Super Bowl at the Steeler fans with their Terrible Towels. Imagine what's happening inside their minds as they wave the gold rags. This is your brain on partisan politics.

This is the level of rational deliberation measured by Emory researchers who scanned the brains of devout Republicans and Democrats contemplating statements by George Bush or John Kerry. When faced with contradictions by their party's leader, the partisans responded like the Pittsburghers who still refer to Franco Harris's dubious touchdown in 1972 as the Immaculate Reception.

I don't mean to suggest there's anything wrong with my fellow Pittsburghers (or the Immaculate Reception). My living room is equipped for tomorrow with four official Terrible Towels. Sports fans, believe it or not, enjoy above-average mental health. But there is no evidence that politics improves when it's conducted like the Super Bowl.

When a rabid fan watches his team, his brain reacts as if he's on the field. (The deluded Seahawks fans actually call themselves The 12th Man.) The fan's testosterone surges when his team wins and plummets when it loses. One study found that both male and female fans of a college basketball team suddenly rated themselves as more sexually attractive when their team won.

After an impressive play, the levels of dopamine in fans' brains spike similarly to the brain's response to cocaine. When their team wins, their level of arousal — as measured by heart rate, brain waves and perspiration — is comparable to their reactions to erotic photos or pictures of animal attacks. (Don't ask why killer animals are as stimulating as pornography. That's beyond my expertise.)

When their team loses, serious fans tend to blame bad luck or bad referees, the same coping mechanism observed by the Emory psychologists who studied political partisans. When the Democrats or Republicans were confronted with contradictory statements by their party's candidate, the parts of their brain involved in reasoning and judgment took a break while the emotional centers lit up.

"People were feeling distressed," says Drew Westen, the lead researcher, "and they were latching onto any kind of beliefs that would make them feel better." The brain then turned off its negative emotions and activated the feel-good circuits.

"If their candidate does something slimy or contradictory, they deny it, and their brain rewards them with the same kind of dopamine victory signal that sports fans get," Westen explains. "The moral in politics is that you really have to make conscious efforts to avoid self-deception. It makes it pretty hard to learn anything if your brain is telling you that every fumble by your team was actually a bad call by the referee."

Die-hard sports fans tend to be less lonely and depressed than average, presumably because they're satisfying their inner Stone Age warrior. Fake wars are a healthy outlet for those yearnings to unite and vanquish the enemy clan. But turning politics into a war between good and evil is not so satisfying, because neither side ever wins and the public grows tired of the spectacle.

Most Americans aren't wildly partisan, but they're stuck with a national political debate led by the new tribes at the extreme of each party: the voters who commune on talk shows and blogs, the politicians in gerrymandered districts who play only to the party faithful.

As these extremists have come to dominate Congress, the State of the Union address has been looking more and more like the Super Bowl. The lawmakers haven't started painting team colors on their faces yet, but Republican supporters of the Iraq war did show their solidarity at last year's speech by holding up purple fingers.

This year the Democrats came close to doing the wave when they ecstatically rose to cheer the defeat of Social Security reform, and the audience got into the spirit by introducing team jerseys. The Capitol police ejected Cindy Sheehan and a Republican congressman's wife for wearing dueling T-shirts, but the police later acknowledged they should have been allowed to stay.

So next year we should have more T-shirts and more innovations — maybe team hats, which the Capitol police told me would be acceptable. The police spokeswoman wasn't sure about Terrible Towels, but after the Steelers win the Super Bowl, look for red and blue rags waving during next year's speech. Just don't expect either side to be as happy as the Steeler fans tomorrow.

Photo credit: John Tierney. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)