We Should Care More About Campaign Finance
By: Karawynn Long
Tags: Politics, Election 2020, Psychology

“I don’t care who [politician’s name] takes money from.”

I saw this comment on a Facebook post recently, and it shocked me. I had to remind myself that not too many years ago, I might have said the same sort of thing. I knew that some politicians are corrupt, but I also believed that for a genuinely principled person, money would have no real effect on their choices.

What changed my mind? Science.

Some years ago, I went through a period of fascination with behavioral economics — which, for those of you who don’t know, is kind of like the Reese’s Peanut Butter cup of the social sciences: “You got your economics in my psychology!” “You got your psychology in my economics!”

One of the books I read then was Dan Ariely’s The Honest Truth About Dishonesty, which has a chapter on ‘conflicts of interest’. He begins by describing a landmark 2010 study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, titled “Monetary Favors and Their Influence on Neural Responses and Revealed Preference.” The authors define ‘favor’ as a situation “in which one agent makes a gesture or provides a gift without any explicit expectation of reciprocity.” Like, say … a campaign donation.

The study was constructed like this: First, participants were told that their participation fee (variously $30, $100, or $300) was provided by one of two art galleries.

Next, the participants were shown a series of 60 paintings — each randomly paired with the logo of either the sponsor gallery or the non-sponsor one — while an fMRI machine ran brain scans. Finally, outside the scanner, they were shown the 60 paintings and logos again and asked to rate how much they liked or disliked each piece on a nine-point scale.

The fMRI scans showed that viewing the paintings paired with the sponsor logo caused significantly different brain activity compared with the non-sponsor paintings — especially in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain essential for social decision-making. In the second part of the study, participants said they liked the art from their sponsor gallery more, irrespective of the style of painting.

What’s more, it turns out that the higher the participation fee, the more intense the unconscious favoritism for the sponsor gallery. The effect on both brain imaging and rated preference was smallest at $30, larger at $100, and very large at $300. Yet when participants were asked whether the sponsor’s logo had any effect on their art preferences, every single one answered “no”.

This last part was the most important, in my view — that our preferences and choices can be — will be — demonstrably affected by ‘favors’ and ‘gifts’, even as we insist that we are being completely impartial. Our own sense of principle is no match for our unconscious mind.

Ariely also talked at length in the chapter about the psychological techniques used by pharmaceutical reps to indirectly influence doctors, ranging from the dispersal of logo-encrusted pens to developing extended friendships outside of work. “Some reps would go deep-sea fishing or play basketball with the doctors as friends. Such shared experiences allowed the physicians to more happily write prescriptions that benefited their ‘buddies’. The physicians, of course, did not see that they were compromising their values when they were out fishing or shooting hoops with the drug reps; they were just taking a well-deserved break with a friend.”

The exact same techniques are used by lobbyists on politicians, and if you imagine that politicians are somehow managing to be more honorable and principled than doctors, you … would probably be alone in that expectation. Governmental lobbyists, says Ariely, “spend a small fraction of their time informing politicians about facts as reported by their employers and the rest of their time trying to implant a feeling of obligation and reciprocity in politicians who they hope will repay them by voting with their interest in mind.”

The Center for Responsive Politics explains it like this:

If a lobbyist, a CEO, a union president, or a PAC director has supported your campaigns year after year, then comes knocking on your door seeking help with legislation, how can you not at least listen? It’s only natural. It’s only human to try to do favors for people who’ve done favors for you. This doesn’t mean that every politician is on the take, or that his or her vote is up for sale to the highest bidder. Nearly all lawmakers elected to Congress are committed to a core set of issues they care about deeply and would never compromise on. But what about the many other issues Congress deals with that fall outside those bedrock issues? Can a one-two punch of a lobbying effort plus campaign contributions move a politician’s vote from yea to nay, or prompt him or her to add an amendment to a bill, or seek an ‘earmark’ appropriation for a generous supporter, or write a letter on their behalf to the federal agency that’s causing them trouble?

“Whatever issue brought you here today, I guarantee if there’s a decision to be made in Washington, it’s been touched, pushed, massaged, tilted over, just a little, so the folks with money do better than everyone else.” — Senator Elizabeth Warren

Sunita Sah is a research psychologist who studies how professionals alter their behavior as a result of conflicts of interest. In one overview paper for The Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics, she concludes, “Professionalism offers little protection; even the most conscious and genuine commitment to ethical behavior cannot eliminate unintentional, subconscious bias.”