Vogt, E. (2010). Technoscience, neuroscience, and the subject of politics. The European Legacy, 15(6), 709–720. When Kerry added the reference to Yale, he fully activated the primary network that the conservative movement has worked for so many years to stamp into the American psyche to galvanise disdain and resentment toward Democrats: the liberal elite. Put together Massachusetts, liberal senator and Yale, and you have virtually the whole network activated. The only thing missing was a windsurfing outfit. That came later. In his first sentence, Clinton vividly conveyed where he was coming from, literally and metaphorically - from a place of Hope. But he was not content to do this just with words. The ad created in viewers a vivid, multisensory network of associations - associations not just with the word hope but to the image of Hope in small-town America in an era gone by, captured by the image of the train station, and the sound of hope, captured in his voice. Clinton told his own life story, but he told it as a parable of what anyone can accomplish if just given the chance. Finally, we expected subjects to “reason with their gut” rather than to analyze the merits of the case. Thus, we didn’t expect to see strong activations in parts of the brain that had “turned on” in every prior study of reasoning, even though we were presenting partisans with a reasoning task (to decide whether two statements about their candidate were consistent or inconsistent).

Lakoff, G. (2004). Don't think of an elephant!: Know your values and frame the debate: The essential guide for progressives. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green. De Vos, J. (2015). What is critique in the era of the neurosciences? In J. De Vos & E. Pluth (Eds.), Neuroscience and critique. Exploring the limits of the neurological turn. London: Routledge. computational cognitive science; ideology; political cognition; political neuroscience; political psychology; social neuroscience.

The latest issue of Philosophical Transactions B is on ‘ The political brain: neurocognitive and computational mechanisms '. Guest Editors Dr Leor Zmigrod (University of Cambridge) and Professor Manos Tsakiris (Royal Holloway, University of London) tell us how this issue came about, and why it is so important to conduct original and innovative research on the psychology of ideology at this time. Tell us about the idea behind this theme issue and how it came about. Like Clinton's "Hope" ad, the first television advertisement run by the John Kerry campaign in the general election, in early May 2004, attempted to begin painting a picture - to tell a story - about John Kerry, the man and the potential president:

Thiele, L. P. (2006). The heart of judgment: Practical wisdom, neuroscience, and narrative. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

The Political Brain by Drew Westen

Rollwage M, Zmigrod L, de-Wit L, Dolan RJ, Fleming SM. 2019What underlies political polarization? A manifesto for computational political psychology. Trends Cogn. Sci., 23, 820-822 (10.1016/j.tics.2019.07.006)

Of course, one could point here to certain strands within anarchist traditions or within Marxism itself, which reject any political mediation and instead put forward direct or spontaneous action as a means of class struggle (I owe this remark to David Pavón Cuéllar). But one could argue, insofar as they conceive of a terrain or a reality, as I claim Massumi does, outside of class struggle itself, they actually undermine and leave behind class struggle. One could opt for a more Lacanian position here, and stress that there is nothing outside of ideology and politics precisely as these are non-All. That is, it is not that there is something that escapes ideology or is outside of it, rather, it is the totality of ideology itself that defies itself. Or, phrased otherwise, the holes in ideology are in the end ideological, and, one could argue, one of the central names for this hole is class struggle, the basic antagonism running through society. Announcer: "For more than 30 years, John Kerry has served America [photo of Kerry talking on the phone, with glasses hanging off his face]." Two-thirds of the way through the commercial, the plot shifted, with Teresa Heinz-Kerry introducing the theme of optimism. The insertion of this non sequitur no doubt reflected his consultants' belief that optimism is a "winner" for presidential candidates. The optimism theme seemed grafted on to both the message and the candidate. John Kerry: "We're a country of optimists. We're the can-do people. And we just need to believe in ourselves again [video of Kerry speaking again, followed by video of profile of Kerry waving in some political event]."An edition of The political mind: why you can't understand 21st-century politics with an 18th-century brain The brain registers the conflict between data and desire and begins to search for ways to turn off the spigot of unpleasant emotion. We know that the brain largely succeeded in this effort, as partisans largely denied that they had perceived any conflict between their candidate’s words and deeds. To elucidate the cognitive basis of dogmatic and ideological thinking, Zmigrod et al. [ 8] conducted a large-scale data-driven investigation. By administering 37 cognitive tasks and 22 personality surveys, and studying the links to 16 ideological attitudes, Zmigrod and colleagues [ 8] examined how psychological dispositions sculpt individuals' ideological worldviews. Through computational drift-diffusion and Bayesian modelling, the researchers found that individuals' ideologies mirrored their cognitive decision-making strategies. Dogmatism was characterized by impaired evidence accumulation in perceptual decision-making tasks as well as impulsive personality, revealing that dogmatism may emerge owing to general tendencies to make impulsive decisions based on imperfectly processed evidence. Furthermore, the findings illuminate the cognitive and personality roots of political conservatism, nationalism, authoritarianism, system justification, social dominance orientation and extremist attitudes. It is therefore a key resource for scientists of ideology interested in the psychological individual differences that give rise to ideological thought and action. Gore's statement, "Your premiums would go up by between 18% and 47%, and that is the study of the congressional plan that he's modelled his proposal on by the Medicare actuaries," may well have been accurate, and in rational terms, Gore had given Bush a beating. But in emotional terms, both the presentation of exact numbers (as opposed to "your premiums would go up by about a third") and the mention of actuaries undercut the story Gore most needed to tell the American people: that he cared about that 70-year-old man, and he would do something about it. Instead, his exacting reference to numbers and actuaries reinforced the story Bush wanted to tell about him: "Look, I'm like you, I don't care about all this fancy math. I care about people. They're just statistics to him." What … happened is placed under retrospective review and mapped as an objective environment. The location of the threat is sought by following the line of flight in reverse. The cause of the fright is scanned for among the objects in the environment. Directions of further flight or objects that can serve for self-defense are inventoried. These perceptions and reflections are gathered up in recollection, where their intensity will ultimately fade. It is at this point, in this second ingathering toward lowered intensity, in the stop-beat of action, that the fear, and its situation, and the reality of that situation, become a content of experience. (Massumi, 2005, p. 38)