During the 2004 presidential elections in the US, a team of clinical psychologists decided to carry out a study of the human brain. For years psychologists had suspected that the human mind—brain and all—had peculiar, complicated ways of coming to terms with difficult decisions. As Drew Westen and team later wrote in their paper on the 2004 study: “The brain equilibrates to solutions that simultaneously satisfy two sets of constraints: cognitive constraints, which maximize goodness of fit to the data, and emotional constraints, which maximize positive affect and minimize negative affect."

The conundrum was figuring out how much of which constraint came into play in what situations. When did the brain decide to be logical? And when emotional?

Given the politically charged atmosphere in the US at the time, Westen and company decided to carry out a study that would investigate one such situation: “The neural basis of any form of political decision making."

(Bear with me. These were the boring bits.)

So this is what they did. They went around recruiting a group of 30 men between the ages of 25 and 55 who were political partisans: They were committed Republicans or committed Democrats.

Each man was offered $50 to sit in a fMRI machine, go through a set of statements, and answer questions at the end.

Each set of statements were about George W. Bush, John F. Kerry, or a neutral male chosen for not having any political affiliation. The statements presented the politician or the neutral male acting in a duplicitous fashion. Slide 1 showed a quote by Bush or Kerry. Slide 2 showed them behaving in direct contradiction to the first quote. A third slide asked the test subject to rank “the extent to which they agreed that the target’s words and deeds were contradictory, from 1 (strongly disagree) to 4 (strongly agree)."

The researchers had designed the test carefully to make sure both candidates appeared equally duplicitous. So, technically speaking, both candidates should have scored the same on the 1-4 scale.

But, of course, that wasn’t what happened. Republicans found Kerry to be much more inconsistent and duplicitous than Bush. Democrats were forgiving of Kerry but scored Bush a near maximum for inconsistency.

So far, so predictable. But then there were the scans they got from the fMRI machine. This is where things got really interesting.

Westen knew that as soon as a subject was presented with conflicting data the mind was overcome with cognitive dissonance: “My darling Bush??!! A liar??!!! Naaaahhhhiiiiiiinnnn….."

But the brain quickly kicks in with false conclusions to kill this discomfort.

And then something amazing appears on the scans.

Westen writes in his book The Political Brain: “Once participants had found a way to reason to false conclusions, not only did neutral circuits involved in negative emotions turn off, but circuits involved in positive emotions turned on. The partisan brain... worked overtime to feel good, activating reward circuits that give partisans a jolt of positive reinforcement for their biased reasoning."

In other words your brain bribes you with joy so that you lie to yourself and save your world view.

But it gets even worse. Turns out that we may not even be fully conscious of this self-delusion happening. The scans from the Westen study revealed that throughout this process, the parts of the brain believed to be involved in cold reasoning remained largely quiet.

Thus if you are a political partisan your political thinking is much more emotional and much less logical than you think. I first read of this study in Will Storr’s book The Heretics. It is one of the most important books I’ve ever read and I highly recommend it to all readers. Storr says that we are all deluded egotists. We believe our political views to be perfect and logical, and everyone else’s to be biased and hypocritical. And yet a large part of political thinking is about the brain functioning emotionally, without our complete cognition.

As Jonathon Haidt writes in his books, much of what you hear when you ask someone about their view on a political development is post-hoc rationalisation. Those words are being created on the fly, by a brain that has already, as it were, lied to the mouth.

There is a way out of this trap. Westen revealed it to the New York Times in 2006: Brutal self-reflection. Best of luck with that.

(I know. Your brain is already telling you “I am not like them! I self-reflect all the time." See?)

So what is the point of all this?

Because if your family and friends are anything like mine, currently your life is being battered by waves of utterly inane Aam Aadmi Party versus Bharatiya Janata Party versus Congress Whatsapp garbage and Twitter oneupmanship.

Relax. No need to sabotage your grandfather’s scooter so it looks like an accident.

Just remember that we are all carrying around brains desperately trying to retain our world views. Even if this means lying to oneself about everything, and sharing terribly photoshopped pictures.

Every week, Déjà View scours historical research and archives to make sense of current news and affairs.

Comment at views@livemint.com. To read Sidin Vadukut’s previous columns, go to www.livemint.com/dejaview

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