Your Brain's Politics: How the Science of Mind Explains the Political Divide

Front matter

Title page
Publisher information
Dedication
A Note About This Book
Body matter

1. Normal Thought: Reasoning in Metaphors
1.1. The Embodied Mind: Things we don’t know about our reasoning
1.2. Metaphoric Thought is Physical: How metaphors enter our brain
1.3. Metaphoric Thought is Inescapable: Not all arguments can be arguments
1.4. Metaphoric Thought is Unconscious: Our mind’s very private contemplations
1.5. Metaphors Don’t Come Alone: The many different ways to reason about things
1.6. The Cultural Brain: Why humans cannot all think alike
1.7. The Secret Selectors: How metaphors determine what we don’t think
1.8. We Do as We Think: Acting out metaphors
1.9. The Public Brain: Metaphors in political discourse
2. How to Parent a Nation: The Role of Idealized Family Models for Politics
2.1. Dirty Thoughts and Low Blows: Metaphors and morality
2.2. Founding Fathers and Homeland: How we conceptualize nationhood
2.3. As You Deal with Children, So with Citizens You Shall Deal: Parenting and politics
3. Moral Politics Theory: The Strict Father and Nurturant Parent Models
3.1. Governing with a Firm Hand: The Strict Father model and conservatism
3.2. The Strongest Might Not Survive: The misinterpretation of Darwin
3.3. By the Hand of Adam Smith: Moral markets
3.4. Governing with an Empathic Eye: The Nurturant Parent model and progressivism
3.5. The Commonwealth Principle: Moral taxation
3.6. Idealized Reality: Of strict mothers and nurturant fathers
4. Morality, Times Two: How We Acquire and Navigate Two Moral Systems
4.1. The Physiology of Two Concepts: Social dominance and social empathy
4.2. Morality, Times Two: Strict and Nurturant worldview
4.3. Torn By Principle: Biconceptualism
5. Deciding Politics: Why People Vote Values
5.1. The Reagan Phenomenon: How to win against political interests
5.2. Time to Backpedal: The political middle isn’t there
5.3. The End of Rationalism: Why there are no rational voters
5.4. Facts Need Frames: The nonsense of purely factual communication
6. Political Framing: Value Laden Words
6.1. The Brain’s Filter: Frames and facts
6.2. The Dog that was a Man: Frames and perception
6.3. Don’t Try Not to Think: Frames and negation
6.4. The Laden Tax Debate: Conservative taxation frames
6.5. What is it We’re Debating? Issue defining frames
6.6. Values to be Mindful of: Conservative and progressive worldviews
6.7. The Manipulated Brain: Framing versus propaganda
7. “God Bless America”: Religion, Metaphor, and Politics
7.1. “Our Father…”: Metaphors for God
7.2. Moral Religion: How God’s commandments arise from our embodied mind
7.3. Abraham and Isaac: …and the moral of the story?
7.4. Religious Politics: For whose God’s sake?
7.5. God’s Favorite Children: The necessary objectivism of holy scripts
7.6. To Tolerate or Not to Tolerate? A question of religious values
8. Words with No (Single) Meaning: Communication and Contested Concepts
8.1. Two Lands of the Free: Why we hear what we think
8.2. Empty Words that We Don’t Get: Metaphors for communication
8.3. Embodied Communication: The world in our brains
8.4. The Never-Ending Semantic Battle: Contested concepts
8.5. In the Name of Two Freedoms: Contested concepts and political communication
9. “Once Upon a Time…”: The Fairytale of Objective Journalism
9.1. Objective Reporting: Ideal and reality
9.2. The Custodians of Conceptual Freedom: Conscious journalism
Back matter

References