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December 14, 2007

Reading the Mind Of the Body Politic

By

ALEXANDRA ALTER

During last Sunday's Republican presidential debate in Miami, Mitt Romney declared he

was the only candidate who had stopped talking about universal health care and "actuallygot the job done." Across the country, in San Francisco, five volunteers watched the debatewhile wearing electrode-studded headsets that track electrical activity in the brain.

When Mr. Romney said the words "got the job done," there was a pronounced shift in

activity in their prefrontal lobes. "They liked what they were hearing," said Brad Feldman,an analyst with EmSense Corp., the company that conducted the test.

This campaign season, the newest thing in presidential politics is neuroscience. Driven by

new research that suggests monitoring voters' brains, pupils and pulses may be moreeffective than listening to what they say, EmSense is one of a cottage industry ofneuromarketing firms across the country that are pitching their services to presidential

campaigns. Seattle's Lucid Systems is trumpeting a biofeedback program that tracks brainwaves, pupil dilation, perspiration and facial-muscle movements, while a Chicago companysays it is talking to campaigns about its voice-analysis technology, which is used in

insurance-fraud cases. Drew Westen, a clinical psychologist at Emory University who has

used brain scans to study voters, recently launched Westen Strategies, a consultancy thatpromises to help clients understand the "neural networks" that govern political behavior.

Earlier this year, staffers working for John Edwards flew Mr. Westen in to watch thecandidate on the campaign trail and offer feedback (Mr. Westen and a campaign spokesmandeclined to elaborate). Campaign-strategy consultant, TargetPoint, which is working for

Mr. Romney, has begun running Internet surveys that test voters' subconscious impressionsand is considering conducting research with brain scanners.

The goal is to deploy the same techniques currently used to track the way consumers

respond to cars, perfume, videogames, Web browsers and movie trailers. The informationthe researchers gather could help candidates make any number of adjustments, includingwhich issues to discuss in which states, what specific terms to use in stump speeches and

what cadence or facial expressions to use when delivering them. "Political marketing is afairly pure analog to commercial marketing," says David Remer, chairman of LucidSystems. "I'm looking at a package of shampoo the same way I'm looking at my next

leader."


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Some prominent scientists say neuromarketing firms may be promising more than they can

deliver. Liz Phelps, the director of a neuroscience laboratory at New York University whohas reviewed recent studies, is critical of the idea that images of brain activity can predicthow people will behave -- especially when it comes to politics. Last month, the journal

"Nature" criticized a study conducted by a neuromarketing firm this year that had usedbrain scans to measure people's responses to the 2008 presidential candidates. "Doesanyone need a $3 million scanner to conclude that Hillary needs to work on her support

from swing voters?" it said.

One reason these tactics are catching on is the increasing wealth of campaigns. According

to the Center for Responsive Politics, the candidates have spent $420 million in the firstnine months of this year, which is more than double the $182 million spent in the first nine

months of 2003. Jon Krosnick, a Stanford political scientist who works with the AmericanNational Election Studies, an academic research project that surveys voter attitudes andbehaviors, says candidates may be more interested in measuring the deeper biases of voters

in a campaign whose contenders include a Mormon, a woman and an African-American."We need a tricky way to get into people's minds and find out who they're going to vote forinstead of asking directly," Mr. Krosnick says.


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An EmSense employee at work

Snap Judgments

Researchers say the modern realities of politics demand that candidates find ways to reachpeople who are distracted and prone to making snap judgments about issues. TargetPoint,

the Virginia-based political and business consulting firm that worked for the Bushcampaign in 2004 and is now working for Mr. Romney (his campaign paid the consultancy$345,000 last quarter, according to Federal Election Commission records) is seeking ways

around the problem. Alex Lundry, the company's research director, says traditionalmethods of polling voters are sometimes inaccurate. "People may say one thing in a focusgroup and do another thing in the voting booth," he says. To get beyond this, Mr. Lundry

says, the company developed an Internet survey that asks voters questions like whichcandidate they support. But rather than just tallying the results, the survey tests theirsubconscious attitudes by recording how quickly the respondents enter their answers -- the

theory being that faster responses indicate stronger feelings.

So far, TargetPoint has used the survey four times, sampling 3,200 Republicans who arelikely primary voters. Alex Gage, Mr. Romney's director of strategy, says the campaign islooking at the reaction-time data to gauge the "intensity" of voters' views. "It has a lot to do

with how mature an opinion may be," he says.

Volunteers watch the debate

Mr. Westen, a clinical psychologist who specializes in personality disorders, is author of a

2007 book "The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation."In his studies, which have involved placing partisan voters in brain scanners, he found that

when voters look at pictures of candidates or listen to their statements, the regions of thebrain associated with emotion are more engaged than the regions governing thought.Instead of detailing a ten-point health-care plan, he says, politicians would be better off

talking about health care in moral terms.


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An October Federal Election Commission filing shows Mr. Edwards's campaign paid$1,951 to Westen Strategies for air fare. Mark Kornblau, Mr. Edwards's traveling presssecretary, said Mr. Westen had come to observe the candidate and give him some feedback.

"He has gained notoriety and respect in the Democratic party with his book," Mr. Kornblausays. "It was helpful to hear his ideas." Mr. Westen declined to comment on the discussion.

Presidential campaigns have always played to the emotions of voters: Thomas Jefferson's

opponents warned that if he was elected, murder, incest, robbery and rape would flourish,while Andrew Jackson's detractors circulated a portrait of him as Shakespeare's villainRichard III. Lyndon Johnson's campaign aired a famous 1964 ad that cut from a girl

picking flowers to a mushroom cloud. The notion that candidates are sold to the publicmuch like products became a standard cultural trope with the 1969 book "The Selling of thePresident," which argued that Richard Nixon's campaign profited from selling spin over

substance.

Adjusting the headset

Since 1969, according to the American Association of Political Consultants, the number ofconsultants has risen from a handful to more than 1,500. As their ranks have grown, theirmethods have become more sophisticated and data-driven. In the 1980s, focus groups

became popular, as did "dial groups" where participants register their reactions tocandidates with electronic dials. The most cited innovation in 2004 was microtargeting, astrategy borrowed from corporate marketing firms that involves tailoring specific messages

to individual households based on their consumer profiles -- what magazines they subscribeto or the brands of cars they buy.

In recent years, advances in brain-scanning technology have allowed researchers to identify

areas of the brain involved in political beliefs and in some cases, to conclude that political

views and behaviors are hard-wired. A recent study conducted by New York Universitypsychology professor David Amodio, which was published this September in the journal

Nature Neuroscience, tracked electrical fluctuations in the brains of 43 self-identifiedliberals and conservatives while they performed a simple cognitive task. The resultssuggested liberals were better than conservatives at adapting their behavior to new

circumstances.

Grading on Looks


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Another recent study by a pair of Princeton psychologists found that when test subjects areasked to choose between two unfamiliar candidates based solely on how competent theylook, the results can predict the election outcome with 70% accuracy. (The researchers used

photos from candidates in 124 gubernatorial elections from 1996 to 2006, and 29 Senateraces from 2006 and made sure test subjects did not recognize the politicians.)

EmSense was founded in California in 2004 by students from the Massachusetts Institute of

Technology to develop videogame controllers that could be operated by brain activity. Ithas since moved into market research, testing people's subconscious reactions to videogames and TV commercials. Earlier this year the company began running studies on

presidential debates and presidential campaign ads in a bid to expand into politics.

The "EmGear" headset

Last Sunday at a San Francisco hotel ballroom, EmSense researchers fitted five volunteers,

all undecided Republicans, with battery-powered headsets made of elastic and lined withbits of copper. As they watched the debate on a big screen, the wireless units, which the

company calls "EmGear," collected data on their skin temperature, heart rate, eye-blinkingand brain activity and beamed them to a bank of computers. The data were run through aformula created by EmSense to identify whether a response was positive or negative.

When John McCain ran through a list of Hispanic politicians who had endorsed him, the

company says the brain-wave frequencies of the test subjects stayed flat, indicating a lackof interest. When Mike Huckabee argued that withdrawing troops from Iraq would create a

power vacuum for terrorists, the volunteers' adrenaline spiked. Fred Thompson's discussion

of health care caused a pattern of brain activity that suggests the viewers thought aboutwhat he said, but didn't like it. The company, which says it plans to begin contactingcampaigns later this month, says it could help candidates vet advertisements or hone their

language and delivery in speeches.

Politics has always lagged behind business in adopting new marketing methods. One reasonis cost: A typical brain-scan study costs around $10,000 for a small sample and can run upto $50,000 for multiple demographics. Moreover, candidates may shy away from tactics

that could be seen as calculating or manipulative. "Taken to its logical limit," says MarthaFarah, director of the neuroethics program at the University of Pennsylvania, "it's a kind ofmind reading."


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Carter Eskew, a Democratic strategist who isn't affiliated with a 2008 campaign, says thewide adoption of these techniques is inevitable. "I'm very open and receptive to this,

because political communication has been stuck in recent years," he says. In previous

election cycles, "focus groups were considered tacky, [as were] dial groups, and these weretaboos that were quickly broken."

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