Keyword – the neural substrate of political attitudes

Pólya, Tamás:

Can the divisive rhetoric of authoritarian political leaders be overcome? An evolutionary psychological analysis and proposals for a communication strategy Pt. I.

The popularity of authoritarian political leaders cannot be countered unless we understand the logic of their acceptance by their followers. The first part of this paper describes this logic in a multidisciplinary framework, based on three notions. First, that much of the popularity of authoritarian leaders seems to stem from their followers’ sense of being threatened (evolutionary psychology, sociology, political science). Second, that the neural substrates for one’s political beliefs and attitudes partly overlap with those for the ‘sacred,’ deeply held beliefs that are constitutive of one’s identity (such as their religious faith), so that it is very difficult to change these beliefs by offering educative facts or information to the believers that are different from their own views, as the attempted change triggers a strong resistance by the neural and psychological mechanisms developed for safeguarding the subjects’ identity (neuroscience, sociology of religion). Third, when an individual is facing political views opposing his or her own views, s/he will react at the neural level as if s/he had encountered a threatening environmental stimulus (neuroscience). The question then is, how can one’s political beliefs and convictions be possibly altered if they react to opposing political views as if being threatened both physically and in their identity? What are the limits of, and chances for, intelligent political discussion if our evolutionarily shaped proclivities act so efficiently against attempted belief-change? This paper (and its follow-up, see Pólya 2020) offers some basic recommendations for a communication strategy that might be deployed against authoritarian leaders and their deeply divisive rhetoric.

Keywords: individual and group identity, threatening stimuli and the perception of threat, the neural substrate of political attitudes, authoritarian leavers and their followers, the hostile and divisive chetoric of conflict, political communication, evolutionary psychology