Should political scientists care what happens in 39 milliseconds?

In a word, ‘Yes’. I believe this is a bit like asking if physicists should care what happens at the picometer scale (atoms range from approximately 30-500 picometers in diameter). Just as it would be impossible to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the physical world without a model of the atom, it is impossible to build a robust understanding of human behavior without a model of cognition, which takes place at the scale of milliseconds.

Argument:
There is increasing evidence from cognitive psychology and neuroscience that some of our decisions are prepared preconsciously in the brain some time before we are consciously aware of the decision. For example, split-brain patients (who have had the bridge between the hemispheres of the brain surgically severed) can be queued to initiate actions in such a way that the message avoids parts of the brain commonly associated with consciousness. Not only will they carry out those actions, but they will remain unconscious of their reason for doing so. Interestingly, the disconnected areas of the brain associated with consciousness may spontaneously invent justifications for doing so, i.e., a patient may (honestly) believe he got up to get a coke, rather than having responded to a queue. This phenomenon may or may not take place at speeds of 39 milliseconds, but what it demonstrates is that humans can say and do things for true reasons they may be totally unaware of.

According the psychologists, these sorts of unconscious decisions and judgments may constitute a vast domain of behavior. Moreover, these decisions and judgments can be manipulated externally and studied empirically. For example, it can be shown that affective judgments (those pertaining to feelings) are not only determined preconsciously, and may be manipulated through subconscious priming, i.e., by the presentation of stimuli for ultra-fast durations, such that the object is perceived but remains “unseen” by the conscious mind. These “affective reactions” are made not only without any apparent conscious effort, they are made more readily and with greater confidence. Political scientists should take note because these effects don’t stop at gate before the realm of political decisionmaking. For example, Lodge and Taber show compelling experimental evidence that subconscious priming can significantly alter subjects’ judgments over political figures and issues. In another study, Payne found that racial primes enhanced people’s sensitivity to threat related objects, such as weapons, in images. The implications of this finding are disconcerting, considering that every year a number of unarmed civilians are mistakenly shot and killed by police officers.

Best alternative argument:
Here I will consider what might be the best alternative position. Political science need not be concerned with what happens in 39 milliseconds because the primal unit of politics is a behavior, which does not take place at that scale. Only behaviors, not internal physiological events or hypothetical constructs such as the mind, can be directly observed. Thus, behaviors themselves should be the basis of scientific descriptions of politics. Moreover, the phenomena political scientists are ultimately interested in are macro-phenomena, i.e., we are not concerned merely with the behavior of individuals, but rather we are interested in high-level interactions between individuals (in aggregate) with society. The specific determinants of individual behavior aren’t of interest to us, rather we are only interested in the measurable, categorical correlates that predict political outcomes.

Response:
While the ability to probabilistically predict political outcomes based upon categorical statistics may frequently prove useful, this should not be confused with actually understanding politics. Rather, these may only be considered as heuristics. I assert that the goal of science is not heuristics, it is understanding. Long ago people who studied politics decided that they wanted to be ‘scientists’. Perhaps they were envious of advancements made in the physical sciences, and were impressed with the elegance and parsimony of their mathematics. While mathematics is frequently necessary for the practice of science, it is not sufficient. In other words, simply adopting the language of mathematics alone is not sufficient to establish a science of politics. I propose below three premises concerning a science of politics.

(Rule 1) Within the realm of science, there are no domains of questions that exist on their own. All “sciences” are connected to one another.
(Rule 2) Politics is a domain of behavior, therefore it is can only be understood within the context of behavior generally.
(Rule 3) Behavior is a domain of biology, and therefore it can only be understood in the context of biology generally.

Questions in science are vertically (and perhaps horizontally) integrated, where one level of questions may be explained in terms of another, ultimately reducible to the same ‘theory of everything’. For example, history may be reducible to politics, politics may be reducible to economics, economics to biology, biology to chemistry, chemistry to physics, and physics to mathematics. Therefore, a robust understanding of one domain at any level is ultimately nested within a network of knowledge-domains.

One proof of these three rules is the observation that human beings are not the only species that does politics. *In fact, one might postulate a 4th rule: A science of politics is necessary species general, i.e., not arbitrarily bounded around the study of a single species, however unusual or special they believe themselves to be. Politics is something that exists in nature and appears to be a consequence of interaction. Because outcomes of interactions can be either positive or negative, we may infer that interaction establishes selection pressures on behavioral adaptations to achieve the greatest balance of positive to negative outcomes. The most likely location of these adaptations will be at the brain, and the most likely relevance of these adaptations for the study of politics is at the heart.

Conclusion:
Scientists are the legacy of the philosophers, who began a quest with a simply stated (though achieved only with great effort) goal: to understand. In 2500 years since Greek philosophers first began to ponder which was the primary element of the world, philosophers and their decedents have continually sought to probe deeper, following threads as far as they will take them. In physics, this has lead to models of phenomena so large and so tiny that the physical (and temporal) spaces in which they occur can only be grasped loosely in the forms of metaphors and symbols. Similarly, I argue that a true science of politics necessarily delves to depths of neurons, or even genes if that’s where the connections lead. This is the logical destiny of science applied to politics. If this unacceptable to political science, they should revisit their decision to become a science. In sum, I have argued that the extent to which political scientists care what happens at 39 milliseconds is, perhaps the same question as ‘the extent to which political scientists are actually scientists.’