Political Animals: How Our Stone-Age Brain Gets in the Way of Smart Politics

by Rick Shenkman

Overview

Can a football game affect the outcome of an election? What about shark attacks? Or a drought? In a rational world the answer, of course, would be no. But as bestselling historian Rick Shenkman explains in Political Animals, our world is anything but rational. Drawing on science, politics, and history, Shenkman explores the hidden forces behind our often illogical choices.

Political Animals challenges us to go beyond the headlines, which often focus on what politicians do (or say they'll do), and to concentrate instead on what's really important: what shapes our response. Shenkman argues that, contrary to what we tell ourselves, it's our instincts rather than arguments appealing to reason that usually prevail. Pop culture tells us we can trust our instincts, but science is proving that when it comes to politics our Stone Age brain often malfunctions, misfires, and leads us astray.

Fortunately, we can learn to make our instincts work in our favor. Shenkman takes readers on a whirlwind tour of laboratories where scientists are exploring how sea slugs remember, chimpanzees practice deception, and patients whose brains have been split in two tell stories. The scientists' findings give us new ways of understanding our history and ourselves--and prove we don't have to be prisoners of our evolutionary past."

In this engaging, illuminating, and often riotous chronicle of our political culture, Shenkman probes the depths of the human mind to explore how we can become more political, and less animal.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780465033003
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	01/05/2016
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Rick Shenkman is an Emmy award-winning investigative reporter, a New York Times bestselling author, and the editor and founder of George Mason University's History News Network. An associate professor of History at George Mason University, he lives in Seattle, Washington.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Mismatch: Why We Can't Trust Our Instincts

PART I: Curiosity
1. The Michael Jordan Lesson: Why people who don't vote and don't follow the news don't think they need to

2. We're Political Animals: So why aren't we better at politics?

3. Your 150 Closest Friends: How many people do you know?

PART II: Reading People
4. Why We Are Surprised When Our Leaders Disappoint Us: The mistake even smart voters make

5. 167 Milliseconds: The amazing speed at which we draw conclusions about people

PART III: Truth
6. Lying to Ourselves: The high cost of self-deception and why we can't stop ourselves

7. Do We Really Want the Truth?: Why we often seem less interested in the truth than we profess

8. Everything Happens for a Reason: It's not just kids we prefer fairy tales

9. It's Like It Was Still 1974: Why people make arguments so transparently feeble they leave others dumbstruck

PART IV: Empathy
10. When It Happens to You: The limits to empathy

11. The Accountant's Error: The danger of relying on our gut

Conclusion: A Way Forward: Solutions are at our fingertips if only we grasp them

Coda: The Widow's Advantage: And What We Can Learn From Her

Editorial Reviews

Scientific American
“A timely look into psychological patterns that drive political behavior.”

BillMoyers.com
“As another presidential campaign unfolds like a runaway circus parade, Political Animals couldn't be more timely.”

CapX
“In this engaging, illuminating and often humourous portrait of our political culture, Shenkman probes the depths of the human mind to reveal what we must do to fix our floundering democracy, and to become more political, less animal.”

Christopher Parker, Professor of Political Science, University of Washington
“Rick Shenkman does it again! In Political Animals, his latest—and best—book, Shenkman proffers to explain why voters so often veer away from what seems politically rational. He does so by synthesizing political science, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, and history to great effect. This book is essential reading for anyone even remotely interested in grasping the roots of the political circus in which the current GOP stars.”

Avi Tuschman, author of Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us
“Political Animals takes readers on an insightful tour of political irrationality over the course of American history, bringing embarrassing political misjudgments into the light of fascinating findings from behavioral economics, evolutionary psychology, and the life sciences. In doing so, Shenkman shows us how we can sharpen our political perceptions and improve, each in our own small way, the future of our democracy.”

George E. Marcus, Professor of Political Science, Williams College
“A fascinating, well-told account of how our nature both prepares and ill-prepares us for politics in the modern age.”

Leonard Steinhorn, Professor of Communication and Affiliate Professor of History, American University
“Politics in America has this Alice in Wonderland quality: what makes sense often doesn't happen, and what happens often doesn't make sense. Drawing on science, history, psychology, mounds of evidence and political insight, Rick Shenkman's masterful book shows us why. What Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point does for society, Political Animals does for politics.”

Murray Polner, author of No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran and co-author of Disarmed and Dangerous, a biography of Daniel & Philip Berrigan
“Rick Shenkman's Political Animals is an engrossing and unique book aimed at understanding our complex and bewildering political world and our inherited myths, lies, and quick-fix solutions that more than often than not end up disastrously in appalling conflicts at home and abroad. Relying upon innovative studies in neuroscience and evolutionary psychology as well as history, and backed by fascinating studies of presidents, people and events, Shenkman offers serious suggestions for overcoming our delusions, historical ignorance, and groupthink.”

Walter G. Moss, Professor Emeritus of History, Eastern Michigan University and author of An Age of Progress? Clashing Twentieth-Century Global Forces
“In Political Animals, historian Rick Shenkman makes excellent use of the latest research in behavioral sciences to indicate why we Americans so often fail politically. And in highly readable prose he also provides wise advice on how we can do better.”

Bookforum
“Timed almost perfectly, Rick Shenkman's Political Animals seeks to explain our erratic political behavior using a different lens, one that focuses on the role evolution plays in how we choose our leaders.... [Shenkman's] conclusions are far from flattering to our intellectual vanity, but he draws on a wealth of evidence, demonstrating just how abject our dependence on our Stone Age brain can be.... Telling self-proclaimed rational voters they unknowingly punished a politician for an act of God or an NFL franchise's post-season collapse seems ludicrous and insulting, but Shenkman's case is compelling.”

Washington Post
“Shenkman mixes history with evolutionary psychology to illuminate why American voters so often misread their leaders, resist politicians who offer hard truths and succumb to facile arguments.”

Kirkus
“Readers will appreciate [Shenkman's] personable, chatty tone and will delight in the broad allusions and the wide variety of historical incidents he cites to help make his point… he makes a convincing case about our hard-wired infirmities and how they work to undermine our democracy. An amiable tour of the socioscientific evidence that accounts for our political miscalculations.

From the Publisher

★ 04/01/2016
Shenkman offers a thought-provoking investigation of why we have not evolved to a position from which we can rely on instinct alone when making political choices. He surveys current research in science and psychology to show that political decisions are rooted in basic human impulses, such as a suspicion of outsiders, a lockstep belief in our own ideology, and misconstruing opinion as fact when it fits our preconceived notions. (LJ 11/1/15)

Library Journal

2015-10-14
An explanation of how our brains are simply not built for politics in the modern world. Why would a series of shark attacks along the New Jersey coast cause locals to abandon President Woodrow Wilson's re-election bid? Why, in the immediate wake of 9/11, did support for President George W. Bush soar? Why do fans of winning football teams feel better about incumbents? Why did it take voters so long to realize Nixon was lying about Watergate and Clinton was lying about philandering? Shenkman (History/George Mason Univ.; Just How Stupid Are We?: Facing the Truth About the American Voter, 2008, etc.) answers these and many other questions by focusing on the disconnect between our brains and our instincts and emotions, powerful antennae that worked well for our hunter-gatherer ancestors gathered in tribes of about 150. These instincts fail us in the modern world, where scale, pace, and context have enlarged and quickened beyond anything our Pleistocene-era circuitry can handle. Drawing on a variety of disciplines—neuroscience, evolutionary and social psychology, anthropology, among others—Shenkman addresses our alarming indifference to politics, our chronic misreading of our leaders, our ambivalent relationship to the truth, and our frequent failure to empathize in situations that clearly warrant concern. Readers will appreciate his personable, chatty tone and will delight in the broad allusions and the wide variety of historical incidents he cites to help make his point. He examines why certain members of the Donner Party survived, why the Pentagon persisted with the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign against North Vietnam despite evidence of its futility, and why we value group membership over the truth. His call for us to recognize and account for our biases and to invoke a higher order of thinking sounds more wishful than likely, but he makes a convincing case about our hard-wired infirmities and how they work to undermine our democracy. An amiable tour of the socioscientific evidence that accounts for our political miscalculations.

Kirkus Reviews