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When Iain Duncan Smith visited Glasgow's Easterhouse Estate in 2002, it was easy to be cynical about motives. But the event has gone down in parliamentary folklore as the 'Easterhouse Epiphany' -- a day that completely changed the MP for Chingford and Woodford Green's outlook on welfare and social mobility. He subsequently founded the Centre for Social Justice, and according to the man who showed him round, was in regular touch long after he was deposed as Tory leader. Four years later, talking to

The Guardian about his experience, he concluded by stating that some of his findings "may turn out to be unacceptable" to his political colleagues.


For anyone who has ever seen shows such as The Secret Millionaire, where wannabe rich philanthropists are brought out of their comfort zone, this might be unsurprising -- it becomes harder to maintain your worldview when you fully throw yourself into a foreign culture (as Mark Twain once wrote, "travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts").

Politicians, like any other social group that is in a rarefied or tightly knit, small community will frequently suffer from psychological 'groupthink' Dr Paul Taffinder, Chartered psychologist

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So how hard is it to change people's fundamental political beliefs? Very difficult indeed, according to Dr Roger Kingerlee, a chartered psychologist: "Many interacting factors are involved, including biology and neurology, cultural conditioning, motivation, personality and temperament." In short, there's a lot at play in any given individual, and most are pretty resistant. "Or, as some put it, 'minds don't want to change'," states Kingerlee.

The research seems to back this up in quite depressing ways.


Take, for example, the 2010 paper 'When Corrections Fail: The persistence of political misperceptions', which found that when challenged with facts debunking various points of view, the more partisan subjects would become even more sure of their original beliefs. A 2012 study from The University of Western Australia went a step further, suggesting that fully debunked myths (such as Obama being born outside the USA or the spurious link between MMR and autism) are maintained in the mind, because it's cognitively simpler not to challenge existing understandings. Frustratingly, the paper suggests that even mentioning the debunked information while correcting it with the truth is enough to reinforce the original lie, which calls into question exactly how worthwhile newspaper corrections are. Completing the ignorance hat-trick, another study suggests that the less people know about a policy, the more extreme their opinions on it tend to be.

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MPs themselves should be highly briefed on policy details, but there could be an entirely different reason why they so rarely change their political views. I talked to Dr Paul Taffinder, author and chartered psychologist, who has his own theory: "Politicians, like any other social group that is in a rarefied or tightly knit, small community will frequently suffer from psychological

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'groupthink'". Originally defined by Irving Janis, the examples of


groupthink behaviour could sound pretty familiar, especially in the current party conference season, with symptoms covering three areas: overestimations of the group's power and morality, closed mindedness and pressure towards uniformity. Taffinder believes classic examples of this could be seen in Gordon Brown's inner circle, and in Thatcher's last days as Prime Minister. This "typically makes politicians look out of touch, because they are literally out of touch due to the powerful psychological dynamic of the group they mostly inhabit: Westminster and their own parties,"

Taffinder continues, before adding that "the balancing psychological forces are of course contact with constituencies and voters, and strong, confident dissenting voices from within Westminster or their own parties."

This reluctance to alter beliefs seems to match up with the relatively small number of MPs 'crossing the floor' in Westminster to join the opposition -- when you remove all those who had the whip withdrawn, there aren't many left, although it does include the likes of Oswald Mosley (Conservative to Labour to New Party) and Winston Churchill if you go back far enough (the latter actually moved from Conservative to Liberal, and then back again quipping "Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat"). But is that the same all over the world? Doctor Caitlin Milazzo, a politics lecturer at Nottingham University, tells me that this is definitely not the case -- a great example being the mass defection of politicians from the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party in 1993, where they lost 20 percent of their members to form new parties. "The two key reasons we see that happening is in some systems parties don't control access to the ballot, like in the US where anyone can stand in an open primary," Milazzo explains. "The second is that in countries like the US, Japan and Brazil, politics is based less on policy and more on other things, like the provision of resources, where voters look at who can bring money back to the district rather than party allegiance."

Back in the UK, I asked another political studies expert, Professor Jane Green,whether parties tend to respond to voters, or vice-versa: "They try to shape the issue agenda so that campaigns and elections are focused on issues they think will give them an advantage", Green explains. "But there is also plenty of evidence that parties focus on issues in campaigns because the public cares about these issues, and they legislate when in government on issues the public prioritises. Parties are highly responsive to public opinion, but this relationship works both ways." Following of polling and focus groups can explain all kinds of policy shifts, from Labour's recent pursuit of the 'energy fatcats' to David Cameron's Conservatives chasing the green vote, and legislating for gay marriage despite resistance from his own party. A wider social change, like support for gay rights, is often reflected in cultural media before the parties get fully behind the cause. But with 13 US states now legalising gay marriage, it's perhaps unsurprising that during the 2012 elections both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney listed Modern Family -- a sitcom about a close, loving extended family, featuring a gay couple with adopted children -- as their favourite show.

Closer inspection of the gay rights movement does reveal one psychological trick that can be adopted by campaigners though, which involves talking to opponents using the language that is important to them. Jonathan Calder on his politics blog, observed that LGBT groups in America won over voters by discussing their quest for equality not in aggressive demands for equal rights, but with language conservatives would refer to their own marriages: love, commitment and family. Similarly, a press release from The Association for Psychological Science found that talking about climate change in terms of 'purity' and

'sanctity' of Earth could win over those with conservative morals, traditionally unconcerned with climate change.


It's possible that this kind of superficial change may be the best that politicians can hope for on a large scale in the short term, in part due to recent neuroscientific research that states that there may be more clear-cut biological differences between liberals and conservatives in brain tissue. The study found that those who professed to be liberal had more grey matter in the anterior cingulate cortex, which deals with uncertainty and processing conflicting information, whilst conservatives had more volume in the right amygdala -- which primarily deals with memory and emotions. It does make you wonder on the merits of extended parliamentary debates when there's potentially so little scope for changing minds, backed up by the party whips challenging free-thought.

So is changing the minds of individuals a lost cause? Taffinder believes not: "Politicians can change people's views, even where there is resistance, but not on a short timescale." He draws comparisons with advertisers trying to change buying behaviour over many years, but with fixed term parliaments now legally enforced in the UK, this has its own challenges. Taffinder believes this compressed timeframe, the media and special interest pressures complicate things: "The net result is shuttlecock messaging -- which to use the political phraseology has no 'narrative'."

It's perhaps then a great irony that a favourite manifesto pledge is to promise sweeping change when neither the electorate nor the politicians are keen on too much, too soon. When it comes to changing political outlook, a couple of things are certain: it's a long-term game, and -- for now at least -- an inexact science.