I listened to an old TTC course by Westen a while back: Is anyone really normal? Perspectives on Abnormal Psychology. He was a bit unusual in that he'd both practiced as a psychotherapist, (trying to cure mad people) and worked as an academic psychologist (finding out why people are mad.) He's diversified even further since then, venturing into neuroscience and doing brain scans. More significantly, he's now started a political/commercial consulting firm Westen Strategies. They offer: "Branding. Messaging. Candidate Training. Nonverbal Coaching. TV commercials. Turning your values and life story into a vision for the future."

Found it surprisingly good, read it in a day. Westen has a healthy dose of pragmatism from his real-world experience: he doesn't oversimplify or indulge in too much neurobabble.

His starting point is that the human brain works through networks of associations. If you ask people to memorize a list of words including "sea" and "moon", then ask them to name a laundry detergent, they tend to name "Tide", having had that network of associations activated. If you ask them why they named it, they will give you a plausible but false explanation, based on some rationalization.

Westen then goes through some research on how people make political decisions. He demonstrates that people generally don't weigh up the pros and cons and make a utilitarian decision. Instead they are influenced primarily by emotion: whether they feel good or bad about the candidate. They are also influenced by narrative (whether the candidate tells a good story) and by the body language of the candidate.

Westen then presents the Democrat campaign failures of the last couple of decades as having failed to understand this. Candidates have spouted dull lists of statistics instead of presenting emotional stories. They have failed to respond to attacks, allowing their opponents a vacuum to build up their own networks of association in the voters' minds. However, that's all pretty familiar stuff from the "framing" argument much propagated lately.

This gets more positive in a number of ways. Westen argues that politicians can lead the public on positions, rather than adopt those positions the pollsters think are popular: the public can have their minds changed. Also they don't care that much about policy details anyway, and are more likely to be impressed by a politician who sticks to his principles.

He also points out that people have more subtle and varied positions within their own mental networks. It's not necessary to avoid taking on racism because you think some voters are racist. Rather, voters tend to have a degree of subconscious racism. That can be used Willie Horton style to generate negative emotions. However, Westen thinks that if the race issue is brought into the conscious mind by being overtly addressed, that same voter's conscious non-racism will supersede it.

However, Westen does favour negative campaigning. He thinks some Democrat campaign managers have been wrong to believe focus groups when they say they don't like negative campaigning.

On the negative side, in some ways the book seems a bit one-sided. Westen repeatedly attacks Democrat presidential campaign manager Bob Shrum for mismanaging the Michael Dukakis, Al Gore and John Kerry campaigns. It would be nice to get a dissenting view, to see if there's more logic there than Westen presents. Presumably there must have been some reason these candidates kept choosing Shrum in spite of his record.

There's also a certain amount of self-promotion in the book. While the basic ideas about how to campaign are familiar, this is the first time I've seen moderately hard-ish evidence to support them.

Westen doesn't seem to have been involved in the recent election, though he approves of Obama's use of emotion and narrative. He's blogged on it here, here and here.

Overall, an interesting book, though you probably have to be a political junkie to still be interested in it now. It may be a little dated in the Obama era, when it's the Republicans who can't tell a story.

Book website with video 1 and 2. Westen article. NY Times (via lm). Review, review, review, review.

Museums
Dropped by Tate Modern to see a couple of things. They've got a new-ish exhibition in the Turbine Hall: T.H. 2058. Nice concept: it's full of steel frames of bunk-beds as if it's a shelter from some apocalypse. Some rather good books are scattered on the beds, including "V for Vendetta" and "Vurt" by Jeff Noon: I suspect some have been pilfered though.

There are also some sculptures scattered around, which aren't so successful as they lack unity: there's a skeleton, some insecty creatures, and they've brought back Louise Bourgeois' giant spider. Still, fairly impressive to look at.

Review.

Upstairs there's a Cildo Meireles retrospective. Never heard of him, but it's very good: entertainingly batty and original. It's supposedly conceptual, but there's a lot of impact there. There's a disconcerting red room, thoroughly furnished in very similar shades of red, right down to live red fish in the fish tank.

On a similar theme there's a transparent-themed installation where you walk around on broken glass, which you can feel and hear flex-crunch underfoot: full of barbed wire, gates, perspex screens... and a tank full of live, transparent fish.

There are some other odds and ends. One thing that baffled me was a darkened room, lit only by a single candle, that's knee-deep in talcum powder. You take your shoes and socks off and wade through it (or there are wellies if you don't fancy it). Not sure what that actually means, but I've certainly never gone paddling in talcum powder before.

The highlight was Babel 2001, a ceiling-height cylinder made out of switched-on radios from all eras, from the glowing dials and elegant wooden frames to modern pulsating LEDs.

Well worth a look. Article

Web
Pics. A380 flight deck panorama. Marvel Rea. Baby Dwarf Hippo.

Video. Hexapod dance-off

Articles. Prostitute trafficking again. No long tail. Why a Socialist celebrated Obama victory. Why American Christians look so stupid and what you can do about it (via Theophiles).

Random. Channel 5 TV documentary title generator. Grill.