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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
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.
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.