Societal traumas can affect voter behavior

Voting is defined as a process of making a choice and decision among available options. Experts, stating that neuropolitics studies focus on voter behavior, emphasize that emotions are an important factor influencing the decision-making process. Dr. Merve Çebi stated that research has shown liberals to be more sensitive to novelty and uncertainty, while conservatives possess more structured and enduring cognitive characteristics. Çebi noted that major societal traumas such as earthquakes or terrorist attacks are reflected in voter behavior, and tendencies to either approach or distance oneself from the current government can emerge.

Emotions play a significant role in the voting process…

Dr. Merve Çebi, Head of the Department of Psychology (English) at Üsküdar University's Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, made evaluations regarding the factors affecting voter behavior.

Voting is a decision-making process

Dr. Merve Çebi stated that voting is a process of making a choice among the available options, that is, a decision-making process. “Voting is a reasoning process. We psychologists know that decision-making is a high-level and complex cognitive function requiring highly collaborative brain activity. It requires the ability to calculate potential benefits and harms, retain the outcome of a previous decision in memory, and successfully adjust decision-making strategies in light of these results,” she said.

Human behavior is linked to emotions

Emphasizing that if considered without emotions, the mind should work like a computer and perform a perfect operation calculating all advantages and disadvantages with the available data, Dr. Merve Çebi said, “However, it is not possible to think of human behavior independently of emotions. Although thinkers have expressed for over a thousand years that reason and emotion are separate, and effective decision-making behavior is only possible through rational thought, with the development of psychology and neuroscience starting from the 18th century, it began to be understood that emotions are an important factor influencing the decision-making process.”

Neuropolitics studies focus on voter behavior

Dr. Merve Çebi stated that the field defined as political neuroscience or neuropolitics focuses on the use of neuroscientific methods and theories about brain structure and function to improve our understanding of how we make decisions about politics, and she continued:

“This field is closely linked to political psychology, which focuses on the interaction between individual human psychology and political behavior. Researchers working in the field of political neuroscience use methodological approaches commonly employed in social and cognitive neuroscience, such as EEG, MRI, and fMRI. Most of the studies related to voter behavior have been conducted in the US. These studies mostly compared liberals and conservatives. It has been shown that while liberals are more sensitive to novelty and uncertainty when making decisions, conservatives possess more structured and enduring cognitive characteristics. A 2011 study revealed that conservatives are influenced by the right amygdala, located in the limbic system, when making decisions. In contrast, liberals are stated to consider more information, research, and expert opinions in their decision-making processes. When liberals took risks, the left insula was significantly active, whereas the right amygdala showed significant activity in conservatives.”

The amygdala is known as the fear center

Dr. Merve Çebi stated that neuroimaging studies indicate a larger gray matter volume in the amygdala is associated with support for the existing hierarchical social structure. “Individuals with larger amygdala volume were observed to be less willing to participate in social protests. The amygdala has been known as the brain's fear center for years. In fact, experiments on animals showed that if fear conditioning could not be established when the amygdala region was damaged, or if the cells in this part were somehow damaged, individuals would not experience fear. Of course, it cannot be said that the amygdala is only activated during emotions like fear and anger, but cell clusters responding to these emotions are very dense in the amygdala. Current fMRI studies also show the presence of amygdala activation in positive emotions,” she said.

Liberals cope more easily with cognitive conflicts

Dr. Merve Çebi noted that there is a cortical area in our brain called the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which we can describe as primitive, responsible for functions such as cognitive control, emotion regulation, coping with uncomfortable situations, and self-assessment. “A more developed ACC allows liberals to cope more easily with uncertain, new, or conflicting information or situations. Liberals having a more developed ACC also reduces this cognitive dissonance by regulating and decreasing high emotional activity coming from the amygdala. Seeing the faces of preferred candidates has been associated with increased activation in the ventral striatum, one of the most fundamental areas of the brain’s reward and motivation networks. This means that seeing preferred candidates somehow creates a rewarding effect,” she explained.

Societal traumas can affect voter behavior

Emphasizing that major societal traumas such as earthquakes or terrorist attacks affect brain regions that process fear in individuals, and that this situation is reflected in voter behavior, Dr. Merve Çebi concluded:

“This behavior can occur both as an approach towards the current government and a distancing from it. If individuals attribute the responsibility for the fear they feel to factors outside the government, there might be an increase in votes for the current administration. If they associate the trauma experienced with the current administration, then a shift towards the opposition might occur. In conclusion, evaluating all these study results, we understand that in political decision-making processes, there is extensive neural network involvement, including many brain regions playing roles in processing emotion and affect (amygdala, insula), resolving conflict and integrating emotion with cognition (insula, anterior cingulate cortex), higher-level cognitive processing (prefrontal cortex), and reward processing (ventral striatum). This means that to better understand political behavior, we need to consider emotional and motivational processes alongside rational thought.”