Subconsciously making our mark
The elections have, thankfully, come and gone -- I'm sure most people have had enough of all the electioneering and cheap propaganda.
Now we can get back to avoiding pot holes and glare at the e-toll gantries.
To no surprise, the status-quo in terms of governance has remained intact. Did anybody really anticipate a shift in the political landscape?
It should be a resounding no, and there is a good reason for saying so.
Consider the intricate studies regarding decisions based on the subconscious verses the logical (conscious), and once you have pondered on it, you will note that the 2014 elections were again based on subconscious decision-making.
The only interesting development with the 2014 elections are the marks made by the “born free” generation. The question is: how did they vote subconsciously?
Let me explain further.
According to studies over the last couple of decades, it has been argued that people generally make a decision subconsciously before they make a logical one.
Such studies are especially intriguing when it comes to marketing, sales and advertising.
For example, when walking into a supermarket, we have subconsciously decided what brands to buy, instead of logically studying each and every brand. This will make the shopping experience quite laborious!
Based on information fed to our subconscious through advertising, and the way we have made certain connotations to brands, we instinctively make our decision, even though we think we have made our choice based on a conscious level.
What this means is that we know things before we realise we do.
This is because, according to research and surveys, the brain accesses intuition (our gut feeling about something) by tapping into memories/information embedded within our brains at a more subconscious level, rather than at a conscious level.
Therefore, we believe our memories more than facts (this is important when considering the 2014 elections).
This basically means that even though our memories are highly fallible, we tend to subconsciously favour them over objective facts.
After all, there are a myriad of processes that take place within our brain and body and, although the subconscious mind and conscious mind co-exist, the subconscious mind seems to do more of the work and is aware of information faster than the conscious mind is.
In fact, a great deal of human behaviour stems from our subconscious mind.
Research into the subconscious has found that it helps to initiate goal-orientated behaviour, creativity, insight, memory consolidation, and decision-making.
For the last 50 or 60 years, market research, as an industry, has relied on an understanding that people make decisions based on rational conscious thought processes. What the science tells us now is turning that fundamental belief on its head – most decision-making happens at the non-conscious level.
To state it more simply, our brain accesses stores information (information we have accumulated during our lifetime) and uses it to make very quick decisions.
So quick, in fact, that we can get an instinctive feeling about which decision feels right and which feels wrong, long before we can consciously give tangible reasons as to why a decision feels right or wrong.
Some will say this means we hardly have control over the way we make decisions.
This is also an incorrect theory, because it comes down to what we are feeding our subconscious mind, because that is the information our brain uses to make decisions.
A lot of the way the subconscious works is that it processes information in the background, almost like a computer with an operating system that continues to operate while we are working on other programmes.
This is why, subconsciously, we are more aware of advertising and brands around us than what we know, because, subconsciously, we our constantly processing information. This all plays a part in our decision-making.
This is what happened in South Africa before the elections. We have all processed a lot of information since 1994, regarding politics and governance, which was filtered into our subconscious.
Thus, a choice was made on May 7 based on our memories and experiences (think of the impact of Apartheid), and also based on the emotions connected to these memories, instead of on fact.
How many people voted after actually studying meticulously the manifestos of the different parties, or was a decision made subconsciously, based on information that was fed to us through political campaigning, propaganda and on our emotions that are connected to brands?
Remember, each and every political party is a brand, and so is Apartheid, so what happens is we make a connection (associations) subconsciously to the DA, ANC, EFF and so on.
When we vote, these subconscious connections help to make the decision for us, even though we “think” we have rationally made our choice.
Politicians hardly talk sense anyway, but they still make an impact when they can connect subconsciously with a voter by evoking certain emotions, memories and brand associations.
This should make us think (excuse the pun) regarding the vote we make. We do so almost automatically, like buying our favourite brand of milk.
We thus have to wonder how many voters made their mark based on logical and rational deductions, taking note of all the available data, and doing some valuable research.
Research into the subconscious suggests otherwise. There are still too many memories of the past floating around and emotional connotations (even though some are wrong) being made for a party to be voted into power based on rational thought.
This again reminds of the Obama “Yes We Can” campaign.
The campaign carried so much emotional hype that it impacted on the American nation subconsciously, without the voters even bothering to check if Obama had a solid plan in place to take the country forward.
Five years later and Obama’s reign proves that the subconscious decision-making in America took precedence over logic, as the country is till struggling to get out of the economic rut.
Maybe, with the next elections, voters in general won’t base a factual decision on their gut instinct without at least exploring the data objectively first.
