In the wake of a few significant elections in the American states of New York, New Jersey and Virginia, a lot of pundits are putting their spin on what these elections mean for Barack Obama and his political agenda. On the whole, I find most of the conclusions partisan leaps of faith.

So, I wanted to take this issue on and outline my thoughts on American politics and the feedback loop with the economy. I will then try to take on what the election last November and just this past week mean in regards to Obama's political agenda and the missteps I believe he made early in his tenure as President.

Confabulation and the human need to explain

First, let me start off with a basic concept of behavioral psychology: confabulation.  Back in April, I quoted from an article in New Scientist about how people will develop false narratives to explain away decisions already made. This is called confabulation. The article says:

As anyone who has ever been in a verbal disagreement can attest, people tend to give elaborate justifications for their decisions, which we have every reason to believe are nothing more than rationalisations after the event. To prove such people wrong, though, or even provide enough evidence to change their mind, is an entirely different matter: who are you to say what my reasons are?

But with choice blindness we drive a large wedge between intentions and actions in the mind. As our participants give us verbal explanations about choices they never made, we can show them beyond doubt – and prove it – that what they say cannot be true. So our experiments offer a unique window into confabulation (the story-telling we do to justify things after the fact) that is otherwise very difficult to come by. We can compare everyday explanations with those under lab conditions, looking for such things as the amount of detail in descriptions, how coherent the narrative is, the emotional tone, or even the timing or flow of the speech. Then we can create a theoretical framework to analyse any kind of exchange.

What experimenters here have shown is that there is a real human need to explain. Things happen for a reason, don't they?  Why did the stock market rally? Why did Harry do that? Why didn't we do something to stop this? Why did I vote for that guy back then, when I now don't like him as much?

To the degree there is an explanation void, it will be filled. The question is: filled with what?

Confirmation bias and the psychology of politics

In politics, how the void gets filled has much to do with philosophical/political predisposition and one's world view.

Drew Westen, a professor of psychology at Emory University, published an interesting book a few years back called "The Political Brain." Recently, Westen has had some important things to say about the psychology of the health care debate (see Washington Post article here). But, in the book, the most memorable political psychological experiment Westen described is very much related to confabulation. I quoted from Wikipedia's synopsis of this experiment to explain confirmation bias in the econoblogosphere back in May:

In January 2006 a group of scientists led by Westen announced at the annual Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference in Palm Springs, California the results of a study in which functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) showed that self-described Democrats and Republicans responded to negative remarks about their political candidate of choice in systematically biased ways.

Specifically, when Republican test subjects were shown self-contradictory quotes by George W. Bush and when Democratic test subjects were shown self-contradictory quotes by John Kerry, both groups tended to explain away the apparent contradictions in a manner biased to favor their candidate of choice. Similarly, areas of the brain responsible for reasoning(presumably the prefrontal cortex) did not respond during these conclusions while areas of the brain controlling emotions (presumably the amygdala and/or cingulate gyrus) showed increased activity as compared to the subject's responses to politically neutral statements associated with politically neutral people (such as Tom Hanks).[2]

Subjects were then presented with information that exonerated their candidate of choice.