Voting With Your Gut – A Sneetch Story
If you’re like me, you see the kid on the bench who’s about to eat a worm. You saw him digging around in the mud earlier, apparently looking for the choicest annelid. Now he’s toying with it, dangling it above his open mouth, mud still visible on both his hands and imminent meal. We’ll check back in with them in a few paragraphs.
Today we’ll be talking about the book “Behave” by Robert M. Sapolsky, a Stanford professor of biology and neurology, a MacArthur Fellowship genius grant recipient, and beard aficionado. Specifically, we’ll be looking at a handful of studies Sapolsky references that attempt to link neurobiology with political leanings. To avoid any biased reading or presumed offense, I will be borrowing labels from my friend Ted and referring to the two main political voices as the star-bellied and plain-bellied Sneetches.
A central aspect of Sapolsky’s cited work is that processing information consumes energy. Anytime you’ve heard, (or said,) “I don’t have the energy to think about that,” that’s a legitimate objection. In fact, that person probably could use a snack. One of Sapolsky’s evidence nuggets detailed judges whose verdicts were more rapid and harsh the further they were from their previous meal. The less energy the judges had, the less likely they were to ponder the details of any given case. The emptier your gut, the more you think with that part of your body. Your brain doesn’t have the fuel to intervene.
For all Sneetches, a gut reaction is the starting point. Refining that reaction on a cognitive level consumes energy, which not all Sneetches are willing to do. Those who stick to their gut reaction and maintain energy levels tend towards the star-bellied perspectives and those who expend energy to produce a more nuanced, ambiguous world view tend towards the plain-bellied perspectives.
This indicates, (and Sapolsky further supports,) that it would be easier to make a plain-bellied Sneetch think like a star-bellied Sneetch because the star-bellied perspective is less mentally taxing, (i.e. less energy consuming.) Star-bellied behavior is often associated with an unambiguous world view. It’s binary; everything is either this or that. The more cognitively demanding, (because of a time limit, distracting circumstances, or multiple focal points,) the more subjects behaved in generally star-bellied ways. Sapolsky claims that this was especially true in threatening situations. The more a subject perceives themselves as threatened, the less they tend to spend energy on plain-bellied pursuits.
This brings us back to the kid about to eat a worm. According to Sapolsky’s research, the presence of something disgusting or perceived as disgusting is cognitively taxing enough that subjects lean more in the star-bellied direction on subsequent questions. A plain-belly would have spent energy trying to tolerate the disgusting behavior and so would have less energy later to make a similarly cognitively taxing decision. Star-bellies have a lower threshold for what they perceive as “disgusting,” are constantly spending energy to deal with it, and so have less reserve energy to muster plain-bellied viewpoints resulting in their unambiguous, binary, right or wrong world.
Curiously, the studies indicate that this result of a disgusting presence is only observed in social issues. When fiscal issues are addressed, a disgusting element appears to have no impact no matter what your belly looks like.
Sapolsky’s book has so much more information than I can address here, I highly recommend you check it out for yourself. I’m not going to tell who the star-bellies and plain-bellies are because this column is less about persuasion and more about information. If one seems obviously preferable though, ask yourself why.
