The Elephant and The Rider
The psychologist Jonathan Haidt uses a helpful analogy for thinking about the relationship between reason and emotion in human behavior, arguing that we have two sides: an emotional side (the Elephant), and an analytical, rational side (its Rider). Haidt’s analogy has it that the Rider is rational and can, therefore, see a path ahead while underneath him, the Elephant provides the power for the journey. However, the Elephant is irrational and driven by emotion and instinct. If you’re familiar with Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, you might also call these System One and System Two. Although nominally riding atop the Elephant, and holding the reins, the Rider’s control is precarious because the Rider is so small relative to the Elephant. Anytime the six-ton Elephant and the Rider disagree about which direction to go, the Rider is going to lose. He’s completely overmatched.
We may like to think we are sensible, logical, and rational above all else when deliberating about important life decisions or moral issues, but oftentimes our base instincts and emotions inform us of our opinions and we use reason to rationalize and justify our positions after the fact. If this is true, indeed confirmed by findings in modern psychology, telling us emotion comes first, and rationalization second, what does this mean for our public discourse and politics? If emotional manipulation rather than appeals to reason are more effective political tools, the problem of political polarisation lies not in us being misled to have particular opinions, but indeed having too many contradictory ones based only on our present emotional state which determines our action or inaction.
Russell Conjugation
Russell Conjugation (or “emotive conjugation”) is found at a unique intersection between linguistics, psychology, and rhetoric demonstrating the subordinate position of factual information to emotion, and showing us through its use just how easily opinions could be manipulated without any need to falsify facts.
The British philosopher Bertrand Russell lent his name to the phenomenon when he famously discussed it at length on the BBC in 1948, without any much follow-up work since, being re-discovered in the ‘90s by legendary American political strategist and pollster Frank Luntz, driven down into a data-driven science to be used in politics.
In it’s essence Russell Conjugation is the manipulation of a word or phrase’s emotional content without altering its factual content, where words can be considered “synonyms”, if they carry the same dictionary definition regardless of the emotional connotation. This however leads us to the dilemma where synonyms for a positive word like “whistle-blower” cannot be substituted in its place as they are almost universally negative with “snitch,” “fink,” “tattletale” being representative examples. This is our first clue that our concept of synonyms requires an upgrade to distinguish words that may be content synonyms but emotional antonyms.
Russell discussed this by putting three such presentations of a common underlying fact in the form in which a verb is typically conjugated:
I am firm. [Positive empathy]
You are obstinate. [Neutral to mildly negative empathy]
He/She/It is pig-headed. [Very negative empathy]
In all three cases, Russell was describing people who did not readily change their minds. Yet by putting these descriptions so close together and without further factual information to separate the individual cases, we were forced to confront the fact that most of us feel positively towards the steadfast narrator and negatively towards the pig-headed fool, all without any basis in fact.
Decades later, the American pollster Frank Luntz stumbled on the same concept unaware of Russell’s earlier construction. By holding focus-groups and by collecting large sets of polling data with more advanced technology that let participants share emotional responses to changes in language, Luntz was led to make a discovery that many if not most people form their opinions based solely on whatever Russell conjugation is presented to them and not on the underlying facts. In the American context of taxation the very same person will oppose a “death tax” while having supported an “estate tax” seconds earlier, even though these taxes are two descriptions of the exact same tax on an individual’s total wealth at their death, on the inheritance of their heirs. Further, such is the power of emotive conjugation that we are generally not even aware that we hold such contradictory opinions. Thus “illegal aliens” and “undocumented immigrants” may be the same people, but the former label leads to calls for deportation while the latter one instantly causes many of us to consider amnesty programs and paths to citizenship.
Being so vulnerable to emotional manipulation without the need for “fake news”, “post-truth era” or “misinformation”, shows that political polarisation is not caused because people share different sets of facts or information, but because they share different sets of emotional responses to the same policies and issues of the day. In the battle for our minds on social media and the news, we need to realise that the things that divide us are often not because of a lack of honest reporting and good information, but because of the different ways we emotionally respond to the world.
The Candid Contrarian 