April 21, 2004

Contact:
Elaine Justice, 404-727-0643, ejustic@emory.edu
Deb Hammacher, 404-727-0644, dhammac@emory.edu

Facts Get Lost in Election Spin, Says Emory Psychologist

For American voters, getting a grip on a reality is becoming increasingly difficult as partisan politics dominate the airwaves and media coverage. Emory University psychologist Drew Westen says there is an unprecedented phenomena developing in American politics where data and facts are becoming virtually irrelevant, and simply viewed as units of information to be combined and recombined until they fit a pattern that produces the desired solution.

"What is happening is that the media, along with the partisan commentators, are implicitly subscribing to the view that there are no true realities, only perceptions," Westen says. "This is a version of relativism that's all spin and crosses the border of what serious students of psychology find credible."

Westen says it's easy to confuse the theory that there are different ways to interpret data (with which every cognitive scientist agrees) with the theory that there is nothing but interpretation. "It's the job of the media to report the data, and if they are unflattering to a candidate, to report them nonetheless, without attributing the obvious implications of a fact to a partisan or anonymous 'critic.'

"They do this by prefacing reporting that could have a potential impact on a candidate by saying, 'Critics are suggesting that' or 'Kerry accuses Bush of' instead of simply reporting the data," he says. The result is that voters are getting little to go on, except their own emotional prejudices and those of the commentators who say what they want to hear, he says. Thus, despite a plethora of information, there is little information reaching voters that is not contaminated by efforts to contort it.

Westen previously has developed a political forecasting model that looks at the role of emotions in how people make decisions about political issues and candidates. Westen found that in high stakes, emotionally charged political situations such as Clinton's impeachment and the Florida vote count, underlying emotional preferences overwhelmingly trump cognition and available facts in how people make decisions and take stands on issues.

"I wanted to understand why, when people are presented with the same information about a political situation, that they overwhelmingly respond along ideological lines, whether as voters, judges or politicians," he says.

Westen is director of clinical psychology at Emory University and holds a joint appointment as a professor in the departments of psychology, and psychiatry and behavioral science. Westen can provide a psychological analysis of political issues, including the psychology of voter behavior and the influence of non-verbal communication on their decision-making. Reach Westen at 404-727-7407 (w), 404-375-6639 (cell) or dwesten@emory.edu.

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