Concept Note on Neuropolitics & its Applications in Indian Politics

By: Sharad Agarwal (IIM Ranchi)

In the last few years, neuroscience has been instrumental in helping the researchers to understand

the nuances of human behavior. Its applications have helped companies to achieve immense

success through successful marketing and leadership campaigns as they were able to better

understand their consumers and employees and were therefore able to create products and

strategies aligned to their needs and preferences.

In the case of political thinking, however, and the expression of thoughts, preferences, and

attitudes more generally, people often are unaware of how little insight they have into their own

decision-making processes. In other words, they don’t know what they don’t know. It has been

shown time and again that people confidently generate post-hoc narrative accounts of the

thinking that supposedly went into a behavior, even when their behavior can be demonstrated to

be driven by factors outside their conscious awareness. Thus, behavior is often driven by

automatic mechanisms, which leads self-report of mental processes to be notoriously unreliable

and susceptible to many forms of contamination.

Neuropolitics is a very recent scientific field of study and research. It deals with understanding

voters' behavior and their attitude and intentions towards various political candidates contesting

elections from different parties. Neuroscience has been able to predict the human behavior and

intentions with greater accuracy as it takes into account the subconscious motivations of the

human being which constitutes more than 90 % part in the human decision making as shown in

figure 1. The traditional methods used for research such as quantitative methods (questionnaire

surveys etc.) and qualitative methods (interviews, focus groups, etc.) are not able to delve into

the subconscious human mind as the respondent is required to consciously answer in these

traditionally used methods. While, the neuroscientific methods do not require the respondent to

make consious decison as it reads the data in real time from the brain through

Electrencephalography (EEG) as shown in figure 2. Studying political decision making during

elections can help illustrate some of the basic principles guiding how people perceive candidates

and how emotion and social attachments influence voting decisions

.

Figure 1: Subconscious mind of voters

Applications of neuroscience in Indian Politics

Two of the area where neuropolitics can help the Indian political parties to reach out to their

voters in an effective manner are:

Choosing the best (emotionally connected) candidate for each constituency

This refers to understanding the emotional reactions of voters for each probable candidates from

a political party to predict voters' decision making for each of them. This will help the respective

political party to choose the best candidate who is emotionally near to the voters. Voter's

decision making is governed by subconscious mind, neuroscientific methods can tap into the

subconscious by directly recording data from brain rather than asking the voters of their

intentions (which is a conscious process)

Effective Advertising

This refers to customizing all marketing communications of political parties to attract the voters'

attention. Attention is a scarce resource for the human brain. During the political environment,

numerous political parties market themselves and try to gain votes' attention for their

advertisements and publicity. Seeking greater voter's attention leads to imprinting of message in

the voter's short term and then long term memory which further play great role in their decision

making at the time of polling their votes during the election. Since human attention is mostly

autonomic with no conscious control of human being themselves, it is immensely important to

customize all marketing communications (advertisements, speeches, etc.) to gain voters'

autonomic attention to gain maximum mind share space among all competing political parties.

Most of the marketing communication including the storyline, level of the language, images,

music can be analyzed to find out if it may drive voters away or attract them.

Neuropolitics in other countries

Most of the political parties, globally, do not reveal their marketing strategies so much of the

information is not in public domain but there are evidences that in the last few years some

political parties in several countries have used neuroscience to get closer to their voters. Some of

the examples are as follows:

USA

USA is one of the prominent country where the political candidates have used neuroscience to

gain advantage over their competitors in the elections. The current election to white house is

using neuroscience in big way. One neuromarketing firm claims that it is working for Hillary

Rodham Clinton presidential campaign committee to help it improve its targeting and

messages.

Oregon Republican State Senator Brian Boquist also admits to having employed political

neuromarketing in his campaigns. "I don’t know how it works, all I know is that it works,".

Republicans appear to be using neuroscience more than Democrats, if this midterm is any

indication. They are appealing to the emotion of voters' "Red Brain" triggers. says the senator.

Mexico

In Mexico, President Enrique Peña Nieto’s campaign and his party, the Institutional

Revolutionary Party, or PRI, employed tools to measure voters’ brain waves, skin arousal, heart

rates and facial expressions during the 2012 presidential campaign. More recently, the party has

been using facial coding (other neuromarketing technique) to help pick its best candidates, one

consultant says. Some officials even speak openly about their embrace of neuropolitical

techniques, and not just for campaigning, but for governing as well

Poland

In Poland, Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz and her party, Civic Platform, worked closely with a

neuromarketing firm ahead of parliamentary elections.

Colombia

Colombia, President Juan Manuel Santos’s re-election team in 2014 tapped into the same

neuropolitical consultancy advising Mexico’s governing party (he won).

Turkey

In Turkey, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and his Justice and Development Party hired a

Turkish neuromarketing company for the June 2015 election, according to the firm’s co-founder

and chief executive. Using a mix of techniques — like tracking the brain waves, eyes, faces, skin

and heart rates of volunteers in its laboratory in Istanbul — the company said that it warned that

Mr. Davutoglu was not emotionally engaging voters in his speeches.

Fig 2 : Emotiv EEG Headset (wireless & portable)

About the Author:

Sharad Agarwal is currently a doctoral student (5th Year) in the area of consumer neuroscience

at Indian Institute of Management Ranchi, India where he is about to submit his thesis in few

weeks time. He has been working in this area since last five years and is an expert in this area.

He has participated in neuroscience training programs and workshops across the globe. He has

been invited to present his research on applied neuroscience at top business schools across the

world including Yale school of management, Stanford graduate school of business, University of

Chicago Booth school of business among others. He has published his research in applied

neuroscience in some of the top global academic journals while other papers are in final stages of

acceptance at other top rated Journals. He has keen interest in the applications of neuroscience

for innovative applications including marketing, leadership and politics. He can be reached at

sharad.agarwal12fpm@iimranchi.ac.in/sharad2021@gmail.com or 07739980722

References

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/04/world/americas/neuropolitics-where-campaigns-try-to-

read-your-mind.html

http://www.fastcompany.com/1699985/how-neuromarketers-tapped-vote-button-your-brain-

help-gop-win-house