Lightning round: Limbic hijack in politics and life.
November 9th, 2007
I already responded to this Tara Hunt post on my business blog, and I was going to write something here applying the concept of “limbic hijacking” to politics and everyday life, like I applied it to the workplace in my other response. Instead, let me suggest these five steps for you:
- Read Tara’s post.
- Read my first response.
- Compose your own response applying the concept to your personal life, politics, or whatever else tickles your fancy.
- Post this response on your own blog. (I’m looking at you, Kris, Casey, Mark, Adrienne, . . .)
- Let me know about it so I can post links here.
This is my very stealthy way of (a) introducing you to what I think is a valuable concept and (b) delegating all the actual, you know, work to you so I don’t have to do it.
Thank you so much in advance for indulging my dastardly plan.
November 11th, 2007 at 11:25 am
I don’t know that I have anything to add, really. You guys have covered the bases well. When my students start working on persuasive speeches/presentations, I do a whole lecture on confusing emotional appeals with intellectual ones and how that’s a staple of advertising. Still, not sure what else to add.
November 11th, 2007 at 11:37 am
Just a thought, Adrienne — hopefully not a painful one: your reaction to Mooch’s illness shows how the dear beastie has limbically hijacked you! (I.e. your rational mind would say one thing, your emotions say another.)
November 11th, 2007 at 8:21 pm
I’ll have to bow out of this one. Just don’t have the cognitive bandwidth to be that creative. Seems like the basic problem, if I’m paraphrasing correctly, is that we sometimes communicate about or react to Subject A with the emotions we feel about Subject B. It’s a mismatch.
“Your language will be appropriate if it expresses emotion and character, and if it corresponds to its subject. “Correspondence to subject” means that we must neither speak casually about weighty matters, nor solemnly about trivial ones” [aristotle, rhetoric 1408a10]
Sarcasm can be a huge hijack, especially in relationships. There’s a place for it in good-natured humor, no doubt (I’m not just a spokesman; I’m also a client). But too often, it’s just an easy dismissal based in whatever alarms are sounding in your head–without actually discussing the cause.
I’m not sure if you know the book Crucial Conversations, but it’s really good. I think the authors might have used the phrased ‘limbic hijacking’ if they had known it. A lot of the book is about creating safety for others to let out the gut emotions, and still dealing with the issue at hand. Good stuff for couples, co-workers, friends, everybody.
Well… I didn’t expect to write all that…
November 14th, 2007 at 8:38 pm
Sorry to be slow on the draw. I just started reading “Shock Doctrine” so the idea of using fear to soften people up or make them act against their own self-interest has been on my mind a lot.
One thing I would suggest is that people who react fearfully and emotionally to things usually do so for a reason. Unless they’ve got an anxiety disorder (and maybe even then) it’s because that fear served a purpose for them at some point (I’m thinking of people I know who suffered violent or harsh childhoods, but that wouldn’t be the only cause) before it became a reflexive response to everything. Fear is their friend, and fear overrides reason.
The trick is to get such people to see that they control their emotions, not the other way around, and that what worked great in one setting may be hindering them in another. The only thing I know of would be bringing cognitive therapy techniques to bear on the discussion. Maybe something along the lines of media-savvy education would work; if we can teach kids to recognize advertising ploys, surely we can teach them when someone in another setting is trying to manipulate their emotions.
November 15th, 2007 at 8:21 pm
kcb — Good thoughts. You’ve rightly identified the big mountain: convincing people that indeed they do control their emotions. Hard enough under ideal circumstances, maybe harder when charged political issues are at stake . . .
December 28th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
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