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Researcher Measures Brain Reactions To Donald Trump (cnn.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Sam Barnett "has been strapping electrode caps on focus group participants and showing them primary season debates," reports CNN, and there's one clear conclusion. "Seeing Trumps face, hearing Trump's voice, lights up the brain." His data captured big surges in neural activity for hot-button topics like immigration, and revealed that while Marco Rubio actually triggered slightly more brain activity among men, Trump clearly produced the highest reactions among women and overall. "The focus group participants might have been excited by Trump. Or they might have been repulsed," reports CNN. "But one thing was for sure: they weren't bored." Barnett has also used electroencephalography (or EEG) to study advertising, and in the future he hopes to also apply it to other complex forms of brain stimulation like movies and even hedge-fund investing.
It's politically neutral - just the brain reacting to the orange light.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
"The focus group participants might have been excited by Trump. Or they might have been repulsed,"
My guess is both. Trump brings out the "Watch the world burn" in all of us. Morbid curiosity is a very strong motivator.
Yeah, everyone always forgets the President is in charge of the budget.
Oh wait, I have that backwards.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
Instead of reporting actual news, networks like CNN (and I guess Slashdot) report content-free bullshit like this all the time. Someone must have been in danger of actually thinking about how government works, and this story came just in time to prevent that. Thinking averted, personal biases confirmed based on nothing, crisis averted just in time, remember to wash your clothes in Tide or whatever the hell CNN is selling you today.
Then let me help you:
Note the confluence of "probably", "unpredictable" and "can change just about anything".
Think about ceilings and floors. Give it a little time, it will come to you.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I don't know if it's fair to compare Trump and Sanders. Sanders has a pretty solid, decades old voting record that gives a pretty clear picture of where he stands. Trump just says whatever random shit pops into his head without regard to the random shit that popped into his head last week. Think what you want about each candidates stance on various issues but, Trumps stance on everything is almost literally, "Fuck it, come on lucky 7". People want him to be president because he's got a pulpit with which to shout their stupidity and insecurity.
I conduct research in a lab that uses EEG to measure a very different kind of processing, so it's possible I'm unaware of the relevant background literature (if indeed there is any), but the most charitable thing I can say is that it is impossible to draw any conclusions at all from the results as they are reported here.
Barnett talks about "neural engagement", but this is not a technical term. Googling around led to his patent on measuring so-called engagement. The relevant part is as follows:
“For example, if a movie was presented to a group of people, the measure of engagement could show the level of engagement the group (or a subset of the group) displayed in response to different scenes in the movie; the measure of engagement could also show how engaging the movie was overall. The method 100 preferably performs cross-brain correlations of neural data, calculated across pairs (a measure of neural similarity), as input for the measure of engagement. The method 100 additionally may function to provide a measure of engagement across small and precise time ranges. Understanding that one characteristic of engaging content is its ability to generate similar neural responses in different individuals, this preferably enables the method 100 to operate without the need to specify a model for the neural processes of engagement.”
So as far as I can tell, the fact that Trump generated higher levels of engagement means the EEG responses he elicited in viewers were more correlated with each other than were the EEG responses elicited by other candidates. This could potentially be interesting, but not without a process model explaining why. Even taking this associative, non-experimental method at face value, here's a plausible hypothesis that would render this result totally uninteresting: Everyone has seen and heard Donald Trump a lot. The same cannot be said for, say, John Kasich. It seems reasonable to me that frequent stimuli would be more likely to elicit common responses.
Maybe this hypothesis is correct; maybe it's not. The point is that without doing the hard work of showing they understand what their analytic technique measures, the results are totally uninterpretable. You can't even say that "Viewers weren't bored" without knowing what the correlations between the EEG responses of bored people would generate!
tl;dr: A poorly-designed and as-yet unpublished EEG study leads to an uninterpretable result that generated news coverage because readers like it when their latent beliefs are covered with a veneer of scientific acceptability.
(Professional quibble with the write-up: The term "lights up the brain" is neuroscientific slang used exclusively with methods like fMRI that tell you which regions of the brain are active. I know no neuroscientist who would say the brain is "lit up" based on an EEG reading.)
I will paraphrase another quote I read here on /. "People are dumb and angry. They don't know why they are angry but, they know that Trump seems to be addressing some form of anger".
Actually, that's close to the mark. The appeal of Donald Trump arises from two factors: (1) he taps into peoples' fears; and (2) he presents himself as the "tough guy" who can eliminate the cause of those fears. In short, he appeals to authoritarians.
People who vote for Trump because they think he'll directly change society for the better are idiots.
Really? Because you go on to say:
Other people (such as myself) will vote for Trump because we know he will be so fucking disastrous that it may cause real and positive changes to our political system.
Considering how intertwined society and political systems are, I'd say you're contradicting yourself.
It's a gamble, to be sure. He could start WW3. As long as he doesn't start WW3, I imagine that his presidency will have a positive legacy on our political system. I just hope we can endure his reign.
So, it sounds like you're an anarchist, and you're willing to gamble with the future of the human species in order to advance your agenda.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Our current President has been impossible to work with, so in return Congress has largely refused to work with him
Bullshit. The Republicans in Congress have opposed practically every goddamn thing he's put forth, starting with "make him a one-term president", to refusing to consider anything he's proposed even when it was something they originally came up with. And now the Republicans won't even consider holding hearings on a Supreme Court nominee, which is their fucking job.
The Republicans shut down the government rather than work with him, or did that little fact slip your memory?
So don't give me this fucking horsecrap about how he's been "impossible to work with", it's just plain bullshit. The obstructionism Obama has received has exceeded anything I've seen in 50+ years of watching our government at work. Form the Birtherism crap to the "he's a Muslim" nonsense, this Congress has been blatantly partisan in the extreme.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I'm 12,000 miles away and I've recently heard republican senators say that they would not confirm anybody for SC justice that Obama picked, simply because Obama picked them. That is childish obstructionism and a clear dereliction of duty, Trump is the Frankenstein candidate the republicans created with 20yrs of anti-intellectual rhetoric.He has divided the GOP and in so doing has handed the election to the democrats on a silver platter.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Clinton has pissed in too many cereal bowls, made too many backroom deals. She's damaged goods...
Frankly, the R controlled Congress could work with Sanders better than it could Clinton, he at least is honest about his viewpoints and isn't bought and paid for.
While I disagree with many things Sanders says, I do respect him. Clinton? Nope, she's dog meat as far as I'm concerned, nothing she says means anything because she just lies, lies, and lies.
If she is on the Ticket, then it doesn't matter who the other name is, the ballot might as well say:
[ ] Clinton
[ ] Not-Clinton
If it ended up being Sanders vs. Trump, I'd actually have to give that some thought, because while he is a socialist, Trump is a bit nuts.
Reality is somewhere in between the two of them. Shame we can't toss them in a blender and take the best parts out and throw away the trash of both sides.
They refuse to hold hearings. Isn't that the minimum due diligence?