Mind Games Referendum Documentaries

We all like to tell ourselves that when faced with life's big decisions

we'll rely on our head rather than follow our heart.

But do we, and indeed can we?

Many scientists think that when making our big choices,

a whole range of psychological, emotional, neurological,

environmental conditions come into play.

So with the referendum approaching,

how will the campaigns use that knowledge, to get inside your head?

We're all driven by both heart and head, but the heart tends

to be in the driving seat much more than people imagine.

We often think of positive and negative emotions as just opposites

of each other so if you feel good then you must not feel bad.

In fact, it really doesn't work that way at all.

We were trying to find out if there was a difference between

what you said and what your body showed.

'The SNP are trying to tell us, that if we vote for independence...'

For the negative campaign you can see that she is bored.

Have you heard the expression on the internet, TL;DR?

-No.

-It stands for "Too long; didn't read."

You really want to pinpoint the voters whose opinions

or behaviours can be shaped over the course of a campaign.

We're emotional beings. Emotions drive much of what we do

and if we think about politics, politics really is about emotions.

Our real enemies are among us. They are born without imagination.

I don't think we've ever really seen a campaign

quite as starkly presented as hope versus fear

as we have in this referendum.

You may not have been aware of it, but for the last two years

the people of Scotland have been subjected to one of the most

sophisticated political campaigns ever conducted,

one in which both sides have adopted the very latest techniques

to find out what you intend to do come September.

And sometimes they think they know what you'll do

even before you know yourself.

Applying psychology to influence the way we behave isn't exactly new.

Places like this have been doing it for years.

Everything from the lighting,

to the sounds, to the smell of fresh bread,

they're all designed to make you want to shop.

Now politics is starting to catch up.

It won't come as a great surprise, perhaps, when I tell you

that the science of examining folk's political brains

has its origin in the USA.

There, during the 2004 Bush-Kerry presidential race,

Professor Drew Westen of Emory University came up with the idea

of putting people's heads in an FMRI scanner

to see how they reacted to political messages.

What he found was startling and set him off on a whole new career.

He's now a best-selling author

and one of the world's most sought after political consultants.

So what did he find back in 2004?

Who'll be voting for John Kerry?

'We had partisans on both sides who were very, very strong partisans.

'We presented them with a reasoning task.'

It was pretty straightforward.

They first saw a slide and listened to it that, you know,

had the candidate saying one thing, then they had

either the candidate or someone else

saying something that completely contradicted it and we asked them,

"Are these things contradictory?"

It's a straightforward task, you would think.

We found no reasoning going on at all.

Kerry supporters all found Kerry's remarks

completely consistent, non-problematic.

Bush supporters all found his remarks completely non-problematic.

And it wasn't until about 20 seconds later,

that we started to see the activation of reason circuits.

And what we hypothesised was going on was people were starting

to rationalise the conclusions that they wanted to come to.

Since 2004, it's been quite de rigueur for political scientists

to put folk's heads in MRI scanners

to see what's going on inside the political brain.

Among them, Professor James Fowler

of the University of California, San Diego.

They'll put you in a brain scanner

and they can predict how you're going to decide on something

before you are even aware of it,

because they can see that the other parts of your brain

besides the part that involves conscious thought

have already sort of moved in a way that helps us to know

that you chose A instead of B, you chose Yes instead of No

on a question, and I think if we put a lot of people in the scanner

and asked them, "Are you going to vote Yes or No?",

we would be able to make that prediction for them,

before they're even aware of it.

So just how much control do we have over our political brain?

Is it, as Paul Simon once said,

that a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest?

To find out, we invited Mindlab International, whose clients

number some of the world's biggest multinational companies as well

as various political organisations to run a series of tests on Sarah,

the most convincing undecided voter we could lay our hands on.

So what is her subconscious self telling her

about what she really wants from September's referendum?

So what's going on here?

This is the cap that's going to measure Sarah's brain activity.

So each of these little things sewn into the cap are electrodes

which are going to pick up changes in voltage, tiny, tiny

changes in voltage, that occur when neurons are firing in her brain.

So what we're doing is just, putting conductive gel in,

to bridge the gap between the electrode and the scalp.

You can look at things like, how much conscious

and effortful attention Sarah will be paying to the campaign messages.

You can look at how motivated with sort of positive

motivation she feels towards what she's looking at as well.

If we hadn't explained this to people,

we'd be sticking it into her brain.

I know. Got to explain that otherwise our boss will get angry!

You've got things to put on Sarah's fingers as well.

Yes, so these are two electrodes,

which are going to measure Sarah's skin conductance, which is basically

a measure of stress or sort of physiological arousal, emotion,

excitement, so it's automatic, you know, you can't control it.

Sarah's also been fitted with an eye-tracker, so we can see

exactly what she watches most closely during the experiments.

So we get a moment-by-moment picture of where she's looking,

how she's feeling and how her body and her brain are responding.

OK, Sarah, all you have to do is sit and watch telly for a few minutes.

While Sarah is watching a series of messages from both campaigns,

the skull cap, the finger sensors and the eye tracker will record

just how engaged her subconscious is with what she's hearing and seeing.

'We're voting Yes for independence

'because we want to see a more equal society.'

'I want Scotland to be leading world industry, I want to see us on top.'

'Scotland will be able to play a better part in terms of building

'a fairer and more just world.'

'And I'm voting Yes for my children.

'Because I want them to grow up in a country

'that's self-sufficient in two of the most precious commodities

'of the 21st century and that's clean water and clean energy.'

'What I want to know is,

'what have the Scottish Nationalists got in mind for my pension?'

'As a Scottish rugby fan, I like to see the English getting stuffed

'as much as the next Scotsman

'but I think we have more shared history and shared culture,

'over the last few hundred years than separates us.'

'We're telling the rest of the UK that we don't want to be

'part of the same country as them any more, but we want to keep the

'same currency, that's just doesn't make... It's not logical to me.'

'The SNP are trying to tell us that

'if we vote for independence we'd automatically go into some

'sort of Eurozone-style currency union with the rest of the UK.'

We'll find out a little later

what Sarah's subconscious self was communicating.

But according to Dr Rob Johns of the University of Essex,

we really aren't the head-over-heart rational political thinkers

we'd like to think we are.

We're all driven by both heart and head but the heart tends

to be in the driving seat much more than people imagine.

We are, as human beings, programmed or hard-wired as they put it,

to react to our emotions and one of the reasons for that is

because rational calculation is immensely arduous.

I mean, anybody who sat down and tried to work out the pros

and cons of independence would need a Excel spreadsheet,

a lot of time and a great deal of patience.

Some people might fondly imagine that they are

rational calculators. They're kidding themselves.

And just to prove the point,

later on Dr Johns will conduct a fun experiment involving random BBC

employees, a verruca, a tarantula and a referendum ballot box.

But it seems there are plenty of other neuro-scientific

tests taking place around this referendum.

Here at the University of Edinburgh, Professor Laura Cram

and her team are conducting a whole range of experiments

from online surveys to full FMRI scanning to see what parts emotion

and national identity are playing in our decision making process.

Some of our early work showed very much that in a short term,

showing a flag as people are answering a question

has an effect on their understanding of the questions

and it changes their answers.

In this online survey, a small,

seemingly innocuous union flag or a Saltire is shown

on the photograph of Edinburgh's skyline before each question.

But it had an effect far greater than its actual size.

If you were shown one flag you gave a different

answer from the group that was shown the other flags.

But what you definitely can see is in the short term, being exposed

to different contexts and in that case it was as simple as, simply

a different flag in front of you as you were answering some questions,

it can really make a difference to the kind of answers you make.

In the end then,

do we really actually have a choice or is it all hard wired up here?

I do think we do have a choice, but what we're trying to do is

find out what elements might affect those choices

and what might you have to watch out for when you're making a choice.

It's really fascinating, it brings a whole set of new tools for us,

to begin to understand some old questions we've been asking,

is it the heart, is it the head,

do we react emotionally, do we react rationally?

It's not as clear as we think.

National flags can be very emotive symbols

and although identity politics has barely featured

in our referendum, there is one place where national identity

has dominated not one but two independence referendums.

Quebec.

This is about language and culture first and foremost.

This is very much a French-English thing in Quebec, you know.

Quebec is seven million French speakers

and 300 and some million English speakers in north America so,

there's a large consensus here that French needs legislative protection.

Michel Auger is a journalist and broadcaster

with CBC in Montreal and he's seen just how quickly

emotion can trump rational argument in these debates.

The No side in the first referendum played fear very much,

economic fear, especially among old people and all that,

so the Yes side spent a lot of time

in the years between the two referendums

saying, "Oh, you have nothing to fear, we'll use the Canadian dollar,

"you cannot force us to give up Canadian dollars,

"we'll use Canadian dollars.

"We'll, you know, we will keep things,

"you can keep double citizenship if you want."

What buttons, if you like,

did the two campaigns try to press with voters?

On the Yes side this was a very positive project,

"You're going to vote Yes, going to make a new country,

"this is, this is positive, we're going to do great things."

And on the No side, "I'm going to lose my country."

Just as strong an emotion.

Quebec's links to Scotland are as strong as they are long.

McGill University was founded by a Scot

almost 200 years ago, and recently Edinburgh University Principal,

Professor Sir Timothy O'Shea, was in Montreal

to present the university with a ceremonial silver mace.

Professor Antonia Maioni from McGill's

Department of Political Science has spent years

analysing Quebec's referendums.

Well, like any election campaign, or any campaign, you're going

to have all kinds of psychological buttons being pushed.

Certainly in the referendum campaigns that we saw,

the No side worked from the issue of fear.

The idea of, the fear of separating from a country,

that was a player in the world stage,

that was an economic powerhouse,

"How would we be able to keep our pensions,

"our health care services?"

All kinds of things that people had come to rely on in Quebec,

so there was a lot of that mixed in.

Did any one issue prove decisive?

We've sort of tried to analyse what happened in that

particular campaign, and what's really interesting is

the way that the Yes side of the campaign was able to play on

an emotional outpouring, but also this positive energy surrounding

the independence movement and surrounding the independence option.

It was a theme that appealed to the left,

it was a theme that appealed to young Quebecers especially.

There was a lot of support.

But emotional coercion wasn't the sole preserve

of the Yes campaign.

Far from it.

It was a pretty civilised campaign until, basically

until the last weekend when all hell broke loose.

At one point, when the federal government

sort of saw that they were going to lose this one,

a number of ministers got together and organised what became

known as The Love In, so they flew people from all over Canada

and people came in cars and buses and everything, to, Place Du Canada

here in Montreal, to say,

"Basically we love Quebec, we don't want you to go."

It seems The Love-In worked as Quebecers decided

to stay Canadian, by the thinnest of thin margins.

It was literally 50.5 to 49.5,

so it was 60,000 votes difference. It was literally nothing.

There may well be a Love-In down Leith Walk

planned for the coming weeks, who knows?

But what we can say is that those same emotional buttons

that were pushed in Quebec are being pushed by both sides

in our referendum campaign.

I've come to Ardrossan to meet the most important people in this

campaign, because the ones who've always been going to vote Yes

are already in the bag.

Similarly the ones who've always been going to vote No.

It's the undecideds who are up for grabs.

So what do the two campaigns have to do, to win their hearts and minds?

When you make a decision will it be your head or your heart that rules?

I think at will finish up, it'll be my head.

My head that makes it.

My heart's got a lot to do with it, you know the feelings, etc,

but in the end it'll be my head that makes the decision.

Do you think that inside there's a possibility you might already

have made the decision, you just don't know it yet?

Not really. Not really.

How do you think you're going to make your decision in this

referendum, is it going to be with your, your head or with your heart?

Definitely my head.

So when the campaigns are trying to win your vote, which bit,

head or heart, are they going to have to reach out for?

The head. Definitely the head.

The UK's not OK.

There is no certainty, there is no certainty

in voting for the status quo.

Our real enemies are among us. They are born without imagination.

Thank you.

One notable feature of this campaign has been

the revival of the old-fashioned public meeting.

Most of these meetings have been organised by Yes Scotland,

whose chief strategist Stephen Noon dismisses suggestions

that they're simply preaching to the converted.

Public meetings are a very important part of the campaign

cos it creates that sense of energy,

a focal point in excitement essentially, and also it's a

way of getting information, crucial information, out into the community.

Everybody who's at the meeting will talk to two, three,

four other people about it, and so it's an opportunity just to

spread the message into the community.

There's always a good chunk of undecideds at the meeting,

and they will then go back into the community

and talk about their experience and so hopefully it's a good experience.

But according to Better Together's Campaign Director Blair MacDougall,

not every undecided voter in this campaign is finding

being on the fence a particularly enjoyable experience.

I'm here as part of the Better Together Campaign which is

part of the campaign to keep...

One of the interesting things about this referendum

though is that we are finding some voters who feel

overwhelmed by the scale of the decision they have to make

and that, that feeling of, of this being almost too big

a decision for me to make, is causing a small number of voters

to say that they won't take part in the referendum, but actually

the traditional sort of, you know, you know, almost majority of people

who are, who are sort of scunnered with politics, doesn't really

exist in this referendum, people are really engaging in this debate.

Well, folks thanks for being here, I know it's the middle,

I know it's the middle of the afternoon

so it's nice of you to come out in the sunshine.

Glad the sun's out, kept the rain away.

Some of the kids are here...

This attempt to engage directly with the electorate mirrors what's

been happening in American politics in recent years.

I'm actually undecided.

It seems traditional grassroots campaigning, or ground war,

where activists go door to door, street to street to sell their

message, is back, while the days of air war, which relies primarily

on the media and on politicians to spread the message is on the wane.

Sasha Issenberg was a journalist with The Boston Globe

assigned to cover the 2012 US Presidential election.

He's also the author of a bestselling book

The Victory Lab: The Science Of Winning Campaigns.

The purely air war campaigns tend to be incredibly superficial

and incredibly empty and I think we have reason to think that

voters are very good at tuning them out.

We have, we've seen a sort of renaissance of what

seems like very old-fashioned campaigning methods

in the United States in the last 15, 20 years.

The Obama campaign made,

they put plenty of money on TV of course, but, they also made

unprecedented investments in creating the infrastructure

to have volunteers go door to door and talk to voters there.

The return to old-school campaigning may be welcome

but as James Mitchell, professor of public policy

at Edinburgh University points out, for at least one

of the protagonists in this fight, it's born out of necessity.

In this campaign we've got a very interesting situation in which

one side, the Yes side, seem to have far more people on the ground

knocking on doors, and so on and so forth.

Now, because the No campaign, have got such overwhelming support

in the media, they are heavily reliant on that, and indeed their

whole campaign strategy appears to take account of that great

strength, as would indeed the Yes campaign if they had that support.

So again we've got an interesting contrast

in these two different campaigns.

It very much is the case of, a ground war versus an air war,

to an extent that we rarely see in politics.

I said it was unlikely that an independent Scotland would be

able to share the pound and share the Bank of England...

Of course Better Together would argue

that the use of the UK government machine

and the overwhelming majority of the press in an air war

isn't to instil fear

but is simply to cast doubt on the arguments of their opponents.

Consequently the Yes campaign has been forced to adopt a far more

grassroots approach to try to persuade

and reassure voters about independence.

There's no doubt the No campaign are dominant

within traditional places like Parliament.

You know, they can get committees coming out

with these big heavyweight reports

and they're dominant in things like the London based media.

Our dominance is face to face,

spreading support through social communication.

So the sense that, you know,

you speaking to your best friends or to your cousins or to your work

colleagues is a far more powerful way of communicating something,

because they've got a degree of trust in you

built up not over five minutes but over many, many years

and so they're able to assess what you say to them

in a very different way from how they assess,

as I said, newspaper headlines

or what appears out of a politician's mouth.

Another American scientific import to our referendum campaign

is micro-targeting.

Tuesday is our primary and I was wondering

if President Obama can count on your support.

Now, for the first time political campaigns can engage

the electorate as individuals rather than as a large group.

Micro-targeting sorts through these combined data sets to

try to come up with individualised predictions of,

of how individuals will behave in politics.

And then you really want to pinpoint the voters whose opinions,

or behaviours can be shaped over the course of the campaign.

Micro-targeting has been credited with helping get Obama

re-elected in 2012.

I think this has a huge impact at the margins, in close races,

I think it could be decisive.

It's a technique both campaigns have adopted

but Better Together reckon they have pulled off a major coup.

We've got the company who were behind Obama's

sort of technological wizardry, working for us,

a company called Blue State Digital, so all of the electronic tools,

all of the data tools that they had, we now have.

What have you done to,

if you like, paint a picture of the referendum electorate?

We do really in-depth, large-scale polling.

I think just to get the full picture of the electorate,

it sometimes takes an hour for our pollsters to get through

the whole questionnaire with undecided voters,

so we use 400 different pieces of publicly available data,

information from house prices, from credit ratings all that

sort of thing, to try to build a picture

of who individual voters are,

because opinion polls will give you a sense of where the entire

electorate is, it'll tell you where people are likely to be in certain

demographic groups, but it doesn't tell you anything about individual

voters, about the person who opens the door when you knock the door.

Hi there, sir, sorry to bother you....

The most important decision a campaign makes is

who not to talk to.

If people are definitely going to vote and very likely to

vote for you already you don't want to waste any time on them,

and if people are never going to vote, or, are very likely to

vote for your opponent

you don't want to waste any time on them either.

So figuring out how to sort of sort through

an electorate of several million people intelligently so that the

volunteers you do have are going to the right neighbourhoods even

or the right blocks, there are ways to prioritise that through data.

They might not be at the individual level,

it might not be at the household level, but can help campaigns

make sure that the resources that they're already allocating are

going to places where they'll have a real impact.

America's the Premier League for elections in a sense

and a lot of the technologies and techniques are trialled

there first so we look to what happens in the States, so it's not

just Barack Obama and his campaign, it's actually just the whole

range of electoral development that takes place in America.

Perhaps ironically, advances in computing science have given

a political advantage to the ground war campaigns,

by returning the political agenda to the grass roots,

in a way that would have been unthinkable even ten years ago.

When you look at the politics of protest for example, one thing that

it's made easier is coordination, we're much better able to

meet in the same square now, so you think about the Arab Spring

for example, many of those protests were enabled by Twitter, because

everybody knew that everybody else was in Tahrir Square, for example.

Let's go back now to our top story and the extraordinary scenes on the

streets of Cairo and Alexandria this lunchtime as hundreds of thousands

of people gather for what's being called the millennium man march.

Let's go back now to Cairo.

There hasn't been a demonstration like this in 60 years

where people haven't had the slogans handed out to them,

haven't been told the kind of things that they ought to be saying,

and the kind of opinions that they ought to want,

and there's nobody to stop them saying anything they want.

But aside from scale and the ability to coordinate massive

protests, I think a lot of what's going on now is very similar

to things that we saw in the past.

The influence of Facebook and Twitter

can be seen everywhere in this campaign.

Professor Fowler is an expert on how social media can influence

political decision-making, and how modern campaigns must

tailor their messages to suit this new era of political communication.

So we've got you here,

we really can't let the opportunity pass by to show you

some of the, the campaign literature from both sides of the argument.

Oh, my goodness.

So, have you, have you heard the expression on the internet, TL;DR?

-No.

-It stands for "Too long; didn't read."

So, there's pretty pictures here but I'm already losing interest.

So, one of the things... They must have tested this, so maybe it

works on certain people but one, one of the things especially,

in our environment, one way social media has changed things is

that we have become used to messages being packaged, in smaller bites.

I can't imagine this being effective at all.

I apologise to whoever created it but, you know,

these kinds of messages with less words with nice pictures that convey

immediately what you're doing, this right here jumps out at me.

This is the one from Yes Scotland.

So this is spectacular.

Yes, right away I know these people are in favour of it.

And there's what ten words there, "An independent Scotland would be

"the most powerful nation in Europe."

And then you've got a really

nice visual that captured your attention of this shock going

between your, your fingers like you've got the power in your hands.

This is brilliant.

This is... My intuition is that this kind of messaging

is what works the best.

And another thing, another reason

why I think that this messaging works so well is, this is

the kind of messaging that would not only potentially change your

mind, but it might get you to talk about the campaign with friends.

In our research with Facebook, when we tested messages, we found

that Facebook was able to motivate an extra 60,000 people

to go the polls in 2010, but those people got an extra

280,000 of their friends to go the polls.

And so, people don't listen to Facebook that much but they listen

to their friends, so if you can change a small number of people in

the first case, that might blossom into a very large number of people.

"Let's do it together." This is, again it's from Better Together.

So this is, a typical strategy where people tell stories

and we all like to hear stories again,

thinking about being around the campfire, this is the way

we used to entertain one another for tens of thousands of years and

so you have pictures of people, that are supposed to be people like me.

And, I'm sure that they have done demographic targeting on

what income levels these individuals are from,

what ideology they're from, the clothes that they're wearing

probably send off signals for what kinds of jobs they have,

and so, one of the things that we know from social networks

is that we are more influenced by people who are similar to us.

And when someone's like you, you pay more attention to them,

and you're more likely to do what they do, you're more likely to copy

them and to take on their ideas, and this is not rocket science.

These guys figured this out a long time ago,

these political consultants but, what the science says is that,

that this is really building on this fundamental tendency

to try to connect to other people who are like us.

So being as similar to the person you're trying to persuade

seems to be the key

but how many undecideds do they reckon there are still up for grabs?

There were about a million voters, a year ago,

it's probably about 800,000 now, who are really

going to make the difference one way or another, in this referendum

and those are the people that we go after relentlessly.

'Hi. My name's Kirsty...'

But few people who will vote in September will have

had their innermost thoughts scrutinised in such

detail as Sarah, our fully-committed undecided voter.

With the help of a red-dot eye-tracker device, her subconscious

political brain is being unlocked by Mindlab International.

Is it possible, given all the caveats,

this is not a big group, it's just a focus group of one

if you like, what messages can we take away

from how Sarah responded to these videos?

For the third one, the Better Together negative campaign

with Alastair Darling,

you can see that she is bored,

she was very, very bored for the first half of this message.

Slight peak, somewhere in the middle, so she reacted to something,

but then again, just went down so, I don't know whether you felt bored

during that video but that's what your response looks like.

Whereas with the Yes Scotland, negative message,

you can see that this was quite effective,

you can see that the overall trend is for her engagement to go up

while she's watching it

and there are quite a few little peaks there as well.

Meanwhile, Juliane, you were looking at the eye tracking,

what's that told us?

For two out of these three,

she focused more on the Better Together campaign,

which kind of indicates she might be slightly more drawn towards these

messages about union, yeah,

Scotland as a part of a United Kingdom.

It's quite interesting actually because what we did is we

showed her images that either were part of the Yes Scotland campaign

or the Better Together campaign.

So we had like the map of the UK versus the map of Scotland,

and things like that.

And for two out of these three images, she actually quite clearly

looked more at the ones supporting the Union,

supporting the Better Together campaign.

And what's also really interesting is when we showed her facts

that sort of could persuade you to vote either way,

on both sides of the screen,

so one was pro-union, one was pro-independence,

for the independence side she just sort of like

skimmed like two out of those eight facts,

and spent a bit more time looking at one of them,

whereas for the Union side

she actually looked at almost all of them

and spent a lot more time actually reading through it.

In a way this has got to do with, confirmation bias, I believe,

because, what you do is if you're subconsciously leaning

towards one option over the other, you're going to try and find reasons

that support your subconscious feelings, essentially.

So Sarah, that's what you didn't know you thought.

You've still plenty of campaigning to go,

and I suspect your vote is still up for grabs.

Unfortunately we can't fit a brain scanner

and an eye tracker to all of our undecided voters.

In order to reveal their subconscious self,

they have to sit through a public meeting.

So how did it go?

Did they get what they wanted

and did the meeting speak to their heart or their head?

Still the heart and the head, and not enough information still,

still like that yet.

Doesn't matter what decision you make, it couldn't be

any worse than it is just now.

What did you think of it, did it talk to your head?

You wanted your head questions answered.

Covered a few areas that I hadn't really thought about but,

the fundamental answers I'm looking for still haven't been answered.

And what about your heart, how's that feeling?

Well, my heart feels a wee bit warmer certainly, you know,

but there's still a lot of questions need answers.

People are desperate, desperate for facts.

Now the reason they're desperate for facts

is that they're viewing the referendum

in a very emotional way, so they are really scared, really anxious,

not to make the wrong decision because they know it's irreversible,

now, that's an emotional response, to the debate, but it

leads into a rational place, it leads them to think, I need to get

this 100% right, and to get it 100% right

I need to get as much information and as many facts as possible.

That does seems pretty sensible,

you examine all the facts before making your decision,

rather than just going on a gut feeling.

But new research from North America suggests otherwise.

Professor David Redlawsk of Rutgers University in New Jersey says

we can't ignore our emotions, whatever anyone says.

That's what our parents have always told us to do,

they've always told us to don't be emotional, think through this, make

a list and compare the pros and cons and all of those kinds of things.

But in fact we're emotional beings, emotions drive much of what we do

and if we think about politics, politics really is about emotions.

I think you have to have some facts,

I think facts are actually important,

people expect more than just a vacuous emotionally-based campaign,

there needs to be something there. The research that I've done

shows that people who try to pay too much attention to the facts,

actually often do a worse job in making a decision than those who go

with a sense of a gut feeling, but I think trying to base a campaign

entirely on facts is not going to engage voters in the same way

that a campaign that engages facts, hope and fear, is going to do.

Did he just say the f-word? "Fear"? Really?

Well, as the author of The Positive Case For Negative Campaigning,

as well as being a battle-hardened democratic candidate in New Jersey,

Professor Redlawsk has experience

of both the theoretical and the practical of going negative.

I've stood for office. I've been successful, I've been unsuccessful.

I've been both the target of attack ads

but I've also been the perpetrator of an attack ad.

'Something smells in Hillsborough and this time it's not a farm.

'It's shady dealings between Hillsborough Republicans

'and greedy developers.'

It doesn't always win necessarily, I don't think you can be purely

negative, I don't think you can be unremittingly negative.

'Let's clear the air, let's re-elect Dave Redlawsk for honestly

'pushing to protect open space, and clean up government.'

If it's always negative then there's nothing interesting,

there's nothing unique.

The choice we make will be irrevocable.

If we decide to leave the United Kingdom there is no way back.

We can't give our children a one-way ticket

to a deeply uncertain destination.

People are critical about Better Together because it's

so negative, but quite frankly, negative campaigning works.

However, negative campaigning which is not too personalised works,

if it becomes personalised, or if it loses credibility,

then it can have the opposite effect.

And I think the danger for Better Together is that it sometimes

overstates its case, some of the arguments may lack credibility.

Please, let's not waste it.

Please. Let's say Yes.

Ladies and gentlemen, that was quite a launch.

Let's make sure it's quite a campaign. Thank you.

It's very much a campaign of hope - because none of us

really know exactly what would happen in the event of Yes

or indeed No vote - against fear.

And I don't think we've ever really seen a campaign quite

as starkly presented as hope versus fear as we have in this referendum.

But could something as innocuous as a fear of spiders, or seeing a burst

verruca, really reveal how we're likely to vote in the referendum?

OK, all the usual caveats here, this is just about the fun,

it's not a scientific sample.

How could it be? It's people from the BBC in their lunchtime.

But what we're hoping to see is perhaps inside our heads a little.

What was this testing?

This is testing the increasingly well established hypothesis that

there are differences between people

in how they react physically to fear

and threat, and that these manifest themselves in political views.

Now broadly speaking, conservatives are more...

Small-C conservatives are more prone to fear.

And you find that those whose skin crawls more when confronted

by threatening images like these, are also more likely to have

small-C conservative opinions, and although this hasn't been tested yet

we are kind of pioneering the test of whether that conservatism

extends to sticking with the status quo constitutionally.

So what we're looking to see is whether those people who are towards

the utterly disgusted end of this scale, area also more likely

to say, well, "No, I'll stick with the status quo",

and whether those who are more on the,

"Yeah, I can take this in my stride",

will also take independence and the risks that it brings

in their stride as well.

So I just need somebody to get the ball rolling by volunteering first.

-Anybody tempted?

-I'll do it.

OK, so, just on average how strongly you react to these things.

They're both supposed to be pretty grim.

Seven.

OK, so now you need to move across to the ballot papers

which are over there.

Thanks very much. Look at them close up.

And then put that number on the ballot paper

along with how you would vote in the independence referendum.

So in it goes.

So if you fill in that number on question one on the ballot

paper and then the second question is your referendum voting intention.

Well as the returning officer appointed by myself, really,

we're going to tip this out now

although we're not going to reveal obviously how our colleagues

voted in the independence referendum, because they get

to do that for real, should they wish, on September 18th.

Oh, there's one stuck in there.

I'll begin the count Yes.

We'll find out in a few minutes if a fear of spiders and an aversion

to verrucas can indeed reveal our political convictions, but back

at Edinburgh University, as part of their series of experiments looking

at national identity and decision making, Professor Laura Cram's team

are using an FMRI scanner, to see to what extent national identity really

matters to people, irrespective of how much they say it doesn't.

We were trying to find out whether there was a difference

between what you said and what your body showed, and this

current project that we're doing combines both attitudes - so, what

people say - and physiology, what their bodies show, and what happens

at the neural level in their brains, to see how those three correlate

with one another and whether perhaps they even tell different stories.

There has been some really interesting research

which is very parallel, we think, on race, and on the way in which

individuals who, on any request to identify themselves

on scales of racism etc, will say they're absolutely not racist.

But, when you do a test on their behaviour, they found that,

people empathise most with their own group.

You still OK there, Emma?

In this experiment our volunteer Emma

is going to do a pain empathy test

to see how much pain she reckons the folk in the film are in.

What she doesn't know is that before she sees each face,

a subliminal image of a Scottish or English national flag might appear.

We're expecting to find, in our work,

that kind of nuance on national identity.

That we have groups that we are more empathetic with,

groups that we are a bit more empathetic with

and groups that we're going to see as complete outsiders

and that our ability to rationalise

is affected by some of those emotional responses.

So what are you doing here?

So we're just running the localisers to begin with

so we've got some images to pan the main scans from.

So these are just a single slice through her brain

just in the three different planes, like 3-D really.

You're doing really well.

OK, just going to set up the first main scan,

it'll be about five minutes.

What we're seeing now is Emma's brain in some detail.

What we're going to see is

what's going on in there in terms of blood flow.

Yeah, we're going to see activity while she's doing the task.

So these images are remarkable in themselves,

and thanks very much for them,

but this is, if you like, the medical physics going on here,

but neuro-politics is beginning as well.

-Hello, Katie.

-Hi.

-What's happening here?

We want to see if Scottish people empathise more with other

Scottish people than they would with people of another

nationality, for example, in this case English.

So we're monitoring what her brain is doing

while she's making these decisions, so she doesn't only have to decide,

kind of, how painful she thinks it is,

at the same time her brain is going to be sort of thinking about this

and working out her responses, and we will be able to see

what it was her brain was doing while she made these decisions.

So what if you like is the basis of this test,

what are you founding it on?

We know that people's decisions change but what we don't know

is why or what's going on in their brains when that's happening.

So this is just trying to take it to the next level

so we can see what sort of brain networks are activated,

parts of the brain that are activated more or less when

we see nationality cues, so we can get a bit of a better understanding

of what's going on when we make these political decisions.

It would be unfair and probably impossible to separate out Emma's

results from the rest of the study, but what she did here today will be

fed in to the overall findings that'll be published in September.

What we can say with certainty though,

is that there are so many more psychological aspects to this

referendum, than we could ever possibly have imagined.

So did the BBC staff confirm Dr Johns' spider theory?

Are we seeing some kind of correlation so far?

Well, it's early days without a scientific count

but this is a classic case of somebody who reacted very

strongly against nine, and they're a No voter.

Exactly as would be predicted.

And there's here somebody, hardly any reaction to the photos,

can take threats and risks in their stride, and they're

a Yes voter, so at least based on those two, things are working.

So the more risk averse people are the more likely

they would be to vote No, the more comfortable with risk they are,

the more likely they'd be to vote Yes.

What does that mean for the two campaigns?

The No campaign will definitely try to exacerbate those risks,

at the same time as trying not to appear too negative which is

quite a difficult trick to pull off.

If you think about it, there's something very

strange in the idea that the way people react to the photograph

of a spider should influence the way they vote in a referendum

on Scotland's constitutional future, but that is increasingly the

way that psychologists understand that we make our decisions.

The inborn, or at least kind of early nurture,

things that structure our choices in all sorts

of areas are also the basis on which we tend to make political decisions.

To work out the final result we totted up the fear score

of each person and divided it by the number of voters to

get the average figure for both Yes and No.

So that's exactly as we would have expected.

The Yeses are about there on the scale,

and Nos are in this territory.

So consistent with the expectations,

the Nos are those who are much more reactive to, this is a threat,

this is, this makes me react strongly, and so they're also

the kind of people who will stick with the constitutional status quo.

The Yeses are more towards, I mean everybody reacts a bit to these

unpleasant photos, but the Yeses are much more in the,

"No, I can take this in my stride",

as it seems they can the idea of independence as well.

As I've been saying through this, it is just about the fun,

but, it's been a tremendous insight because it tells us

that really there are things going on there,

which we think may be rational processes but perhaps aren't.

Yeah, I mean this is not what the forefathers of democracy

had in mind, that people would be driven not by rational consideration

of the issues but by how much they react physically to fear,

but this is indeed psychologists are now

increasingly convinced how we make decisions in a whole range

of spheres of life including politics,

and it is kind of weird that those who react more

strongly to a photo of a spider, are also reacting more strongly

to the idea of independence, but that's, that's how it works.

Rob, thanks very much.

Weird indeed.

But it is now widely accepted among American political strategists

that a campaign based solely on reason and logic is bound to fail.

Politics is, I think, about emotions primarily, I think

campaigns understand that, I think much of what they do

is meant to play on both positive and negative emotions,

even when there's a guise of an informational aspect of it.

We often think of positive and negative emotions as just opposites

of each other, so if you feel good then you must not feel bad.

In fact, it really doesn't work that way at all.

Ronald Regan did this wonderfully positive campaign about,

"America is stronger, America is prouder, America is better.

"Would we ever want to go back

"to the dark days of Carter and Mondale?"

And, you know, he did that in an ad called "Morning In America",

that everyone thinks of as this wonderfully positive ad.

The ad is wonderfully positive but it sneaks

in negatives over and over and over, so that you're not even aware,

your brain is processing them, but consciously you have no idea

that he is just relentlessly attacking the other side.

'It's morning again in America.

'Today, more men and women will go to work

'than ever before in our country's history.

'With interest rates at about half the record highs of 1980.

'Nearly 2,000 families today will buy new homes.

'More than at any time in the past four years.

'This afternoon, 6,500 young men and women will be married.

'And with inflation at less than half of what it was just four

'years ago, they can look forward with confidence to the future.

'It's morning again in America.

'And, under the leadership of President Regan,

'our country is prouder, and stronger, and better.

'Why would we ever want to return to where we were,

'less than four short years ago?'

He never mentions Carter and Mondale, he just says,

"Do we really want to go back to four years ago?"

You can activate positive and negative emotions at the same time,

and both messages are getting through.

What you want to do, ideally, is to have people,

consciously thinking more about the positive.

A successful campaign is usually a campaign that appeals to hope

and to enthusiasm and to where things could go, but also appeals to

anxiety and to what the worries are about, if you take the other path.

As one of the world's most in-demand political consultants,

Professor Westen kindly agreed to cast a professional eye

over a couple of big budget, high production value films,

produced by both sides.

Starting with Better Together's Best of Both Worlds.

'I love loads of things about Scotland.

'I love the music, I love the culture,

'I love the opportunities that you can have.

'I'm proud to be Scottish, it's where I was born and it's...'

What's nice about the beginning of this is you begin with

the music and she talks about the culture

and the music of Scotland, and this is a No ad.

And so, that's, you know, it's a real strength, it's already

establishing, in an emotional way, connections with Scotland.

Like music and culture of Scotland,

and then the scenes are beautiful and the music is matching

the scenes, it's matching her voice, all this sounds good so far.

'..where I was born and it's what I've been my whole life

'and it's not gonna change.

'Alexander Graham Bell, Fleming, who invented penicillin...'

What I like about this is now turning into what I'd be

concerned about, which is, I'm looking at this

and thinking that this is a Yes ad.

SPEAKS GAELIC

'I love the scenery, I love how green it is, I like the people...'

What it does in your brain actually, is that it activates

the neural networks that

have already started to become associated with Yes.

'There's space, there's beauty of scenery, friendly people,

'lots of opportunities for business.'

OK, we're 45 seconds into the video

and we don't yet know that this is a No ad.

That's, that's a problem, because at this point, I'm thinking, vote Yes.

And that's what's been triggered in my brain,

it's called priming, is that essentially when you activate

a network, you prime the brain to expect

what's coming next, and what you're expecting now, is Yes.

'I would say I'm definitely proud to be Scottish and proud to be British.

'And thinking that Scotland would definitely have the

'best of both worlds.'

That was a great segue and it should have happened,

it should have happened about, about 30 seconds ago,

because, she's saying,

"I'm proud to be Scottish, I'm proud to be British, best of both worlds."

'I'm very patriotic and it's because I'm patriotic

'that I don't want independence.'

I would have just moved this up, and if I were

the No campaign I'd move it up really fast.

'I know Scottish poems, I know Scottish songs, I go to Burns

'suppers, I like tartan, you know?

'What makes me not patriotic?'

It's a patriotic symbol, they are really using patriotism,

this part is, you know, really brilliant.

Why are cars going down the road at, you know, so fast?

And why is this on fast forward?

I don't know what they're fast forwarding to,

and the message really, that's going opposite of their message.

Their message should be, we don't want to fast forward,

because if we fast forward, who knows what we're going to run into?

'I think together we're much stronger,

'you're a family unit, you can support each other a lot better.'

That was a wonderful thing to do as well,

they're basically saying, "We're family", and there is nothing

that appeals to people in their guts more than family.

'I don't want to feel like in a few years that

'if I go down to England I don't want to feel like I shouldn't

'really be there because it's not, I'm not part of the UK any more,

'so, I don't want to feel isolated from the rest of the UK.'

I would separate this out into two or three videos.

'If you're going to separate you're on your own.'

If I were a No activist I'd love this.

If I were a fence-sitter I'm not sure I'd get through it,

because I might say, again, rationally,

3½ minutes to watch something,

on the fate of your country, you know, is nothing,

and you ought to do it,

and as a good Scot you ought to take the time.

But if you're busy, you've got lots of things going on,

you've got a family to take care of, you're not going to watch

3½ minutes of a video.

So that's us had a look at one of the Better Together videos, now

perhaps we can have a look at one of the Yes Scotland campaign slots.

'Hi. My name's Kirsty.

'I'm going to be born on the 18th of September, 2014.

'The very same day as the referendum on independence for Scotland.'

This beginning is already brilliant. I cannot suppress a smile.

You know I'm looking at this, at this child,

who's a future Scot, you know, and who is, you know,

you're looking at her in-utero, and now you're seeing a picture of her,

once she's born, and she's going to be born on the referendum day,

it is a wonderful way of saying that,

"Our future is in our hands now."

And in fact, she's literally in her arms and that, this is her future.

'The question is, what kind of country will I grow up in?

'Will it be a Scotland that is fairer, more prosperous,

'a Scotland where I can reach my full potential?

'Or will it still be a country ruled by Westminster?

'A country that is still

'the fourth most unequal in the developed world.'

This is again something that's great about this video thus far,

is, if they continue to make it

really positive, but what you just heard was the first jab.

Do we want it to be ruled by Westminster?

It's basically saying, they're slipping in a negative

in what's an overridingly positive-toned ad.

And, so that you, you don't end up associating negativity

with the Yes cause, you associate it with the No cause,

and, if you can pull this off,

it's a great, it's a great way to persuade people.

'Will the land of my birth be a true nation that stands proudly

'alongside all other nations?

'Or will it be a country with no place in the world, a country

'led by others into illegal wars,

'and used as a dumping ground for weapons of mass destruction?'

Again this is a really strong argument.

This gets back to the question of reason and emotion.

You know, it's making a reasoned argument,

but it's doing it in an emotional way.

Do we want to be dragged into wars,

do we want to be a dumping ground for nuclear weapons?

I mean, those are pretty reasonable questions to ask,

and is that something that the average Scot would want to see?

'Will I grow up in a Scotland where our wealth and natural

'resources are in Scotland's hands?

'Or will be more of the same-old same-old,

'where our money is squandered by governments who are out of touch?

'Governments we didn't even vote for.'

That was beautiful.

'Will I grow up in a Scotland where the decisions about our future

'are taken by the people who care most about Scotland?

'The people who live here.'

This has been an absolutely flawless video.

'Please vote Yes. For Scotland.

'For yourself, and for your children's future.'

I had no impulse to turn it off at any point.

If you compare that to the No ad where there was a long stretch

of just kind of running roads going at fast forward

which meant nothing, and here you're seeing a family

and you're getting the sense of, this is what it is to be a Scot.

This is what it means to be Scottish.

This is what it means to be our own people.

I watched that and I had a smile on my face

and again I couldn't take it off.

So having examined the messages

the campaigns are trying to get across

and with the referendum just weeks away, what one piece of advice

would Professor Westen give to both Yes Scotland and Better Together?

I always say to, to leaders, speak in ways that evoke images.

Speak in ways that evoke the images that make you feel

strongly about this, because they'll probably

make your countrymen feel strongly about this.

Even after all this, you may still think that the decision you

make on September 18th will be made entirely

by the rational part of your brain and emotions won't come into it,

and there is always the chance you could be right, because every

person, every brain, is unique, and no matter how you reach your

decision, at the ballot box, it'll be yours and yours alone to make.

We all reason politically with our emotions.

The political brain is an emotional brain.