Negative campaigning has been a constant of American elections for as long as I can remember, and is now making its way into mainstream UK politics. Seed looks at how evolution can explain both the appeal and recent failings of negative campaigning.
Advertisers, like neuroscientists, started out with a so-called cognitive model of decision making — a model driven by logic, rationality, and the precise weighing of options. But this model “has been thrown out completely,” says David Bonney, a former psychology researcher who has conducted studies for huge advertising firms such as DDB on the impact of emotional advertising. “Emotion, we’ve realized in the last decade, drives all decision making.”
The human brain, faced with a daily onslaught of information, uses emotion to tag certain events as worth remembering and using for decision-making. A parking space is forgotten; a death is remembered. Negative words and actions probably have a greater impact because they elicit stronger emotions.
I’m slowly losing interesting in the U.S. presidential election now that the result seems inevitable (get on with the inauguration already). However, the Obama–McCain dance-off video (via Kottke) combined with a feature in the latest The American Conservative, has temporarily piqued my interest again.
In said feature, The Right Choice?, 18 prominent conservatives were asked to discuss “how they are voting, whether they see their vote as advancing a particular issue or fitting into a larger strategy, and what conflicts their choice might entail”. This from Francis Fukuyama:
America has been living in a dream world for the past few years, losing its basic values of thrift and prudence and living far beyond its means, even as it has lectured the rest of the world to follow its model. At a time when the U.S. government has just nationalized a good part of the banking sector, we need to rethink a lot of the Reaganite verities of the past generation regarding taxes and regulation. Important as they were back in the 1980s and ’90s, they just won’t cut it for the period we are now entering. Obama is much better positioned to reinvent the American model and will certainly present a very different and more positive face of America to the rest of the world.
The split between those polled is overwhelmingly pro-third party, closely followed by Obama. McCain brings up the rear, drawing level with ‘no vote’.
More Fukuyama? I implore you to read The End of History and the Last Man.
Elizabeth Pisani, author of The Wisdom of Whores, writes about HIV from various perspectives: social, scientific, and political. In a recent article she notes how personal incentives are enough to overcome the stigma of HIV-infection.
Malawi is suspending its payments to HIV-infected civil servants because so many uninfected people are trying to cash in. A third of Malawi’s 120,000 civil servants have registered as HIV positive. That puts HIV prevalence among government workers at twice the national rate of 14 percent.
It reminds me of stories that surfaced in China when the government started providing free schooling for the kids of people with HIV. China being China, it wasn’t long before there was a secondary market in HIV-infected blood.
Stigma exists because we allow it to, because we reinforce it by tiptoeing around it. The bulldozer of personal incentives can break through stigma in exactly the same way as it can break through corruption, poor productivity and other areas of human endeavour. If we have to bribe our way into greater openness about HIV, why not?
via Chris Blattman
This past weekend saw Colin Powell endorse Barack Obama for president on NBC’s Meet the Press.
However, the most important and touching part of his speech came when he discussed Muslim-Americans:
Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer is no. That’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing he or she could be president? Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion that he is a Muslim and he might be associated with terrorists. This is not the way we should be doing it in America.
I feel strongly about this particular point because of a picture I saw in a magazine. It was a photo essay about troops who were serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. And one picture, at the tail end of this photo essay, was of a mother at Arlington Cemetery and she had her head on the headstone of her son’s grave. And as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone, and it gave his awards - Purple Heart, Bronze Star - showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death, he was 20 years old. And then at the very top of the head stone, it didn’t have a Christian cross. It didn’t have a Star of David. It had a crescent and star of the Islamic faith.
And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan. And he was an American. He was born in New Jersey. He was fourteen years old at the time of 9/11, and he waited until he could serve his country and he gave his life.
via Link Banana
“The financial crisis is not the crisis of capitalism. It is the crisis of a system that has distanced itself from the most fundamental values of capitalism, which betrayed the spirit of capitalism.” – Nicolas Sarkozy
Two excellent articles on the future of capitalism:
A Capitalist Manifesto, Judy Shelton for The Wall Street Journal
What are the basic principles that we can forge together toward this “true capitalism” […], this market economy that utilizes the power of genuine competition to serve the needs of individual producers and consumers? It is a capitalism that accords primacy to the entrepreneur — that compensates hard work, innovative solutions, stalwart commitment and personal discipline. The values that define the character of individuals should find expression in the policies that underpin the legitimacy of governments. Honest capitalism requires the following…
Traditional Capitalist Values, Eliezer Yudkowsky for Overcoming Bias
Making money is a virtuous endeavor, despite all the lies that have been told about it, and should properly be found in the company of other virtues. Those who set out to make money should not think of themselves as fallen, but should rather conduct themselves with honor, pride, and self-respect, as part of the grand pageantry of human civilization rising up from the dirt, and continuing forward into the future.