I wanted to post this before the election because I thought it would be more effective, but I hope it still has some bipartisan value.
David Rock introduced me and many others to neuroscience and it's applicability to everyday matters. He explains that social needs, those needs related to people, are primary, equivalent in importance with physical needs such as food and shelter.
In large part, this is because our brain reacts to social situations as it does to physical situations. Just as we are either threatened by or attracted to physical situations and just as physical situations bring us either pain or pleasure, so it is with social situations. Further, the impact on us of social situations can be even more intense and more long lasting than that of physical situations.
This 2012 presidential election was a social event and, for many of us, a particularly powerful one. To understand its effect on us, it helps to understand the generic elements of social impact that David Rock has identified. These elements are status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness which can be remembered via the acronym SCARF.
Any social event or impact can be understood in terms of its effect on each of these factors. If the net effect on these factors is positive, the overall experience will be one of attraction or pleasure, otherwise it will be one of threat or pain. That said, negative impacts tend to be an order of magnitude more intense than positive ones, so this must be taken into account in doing the impact calculus.
The following is a brief description of each of these factors:
Status refers to how we view our standing as compared to others. If we actively identify with a political party or candidate, then we will experience a political win or loss of that party or candidate as a corresponding gain or loss in our status.
Certainty refers to the extent to which we are confident in what our experience will be. In the context of politics, this certainty will be directly proportional to the extent we understand and trust the party or candidate that has prevailed.
Autonomy refers to the extent to which we feel we have freedom to act as you see fit. Since we tend to affiliate with the party and candidate that supports the freedoms we most value, this attribute too will tend to rise or fall with the success with our party or candidate.
Relatedness refers to the extent to which we feel that we are meaningfully related to others. To the extent that political wins tend to reinforce the underlying groups and political losses undermine them, our relatedness will be similarly impacted.
Fairness refers to the extent to which we feel that events are fair. Once again, this attribute is correlated to political results, with "our" wins driving up fairness and "our" losses driving it down.
So, in the aftermath of this election, I think it's important for us to keep in mind that each of us is undergoing a social experience, but that this experience is particularly painful for partisans whose party or candidate did not prevail.
If we are in the latter category, being able to label the above elements will tend to reduce the pain they are inducing. If we know of others in the latter category, human decency calls for us to deal with them in as we would deal with someone in physical pain.
That is, if we have the expertise to reduce their pain by improving their SCARF experience we should do so, otherwise we should treat them empathetically and at least not make their SCARF experience worse.
