Author: Michael Platt, Professor of Marketing and Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania

As Election Day looms with Kamala Harris and Donald Trump locked in a dead heat, pollsters and pundits are scrambling for clues to predict the outcome. But what if the answer lies not in political data or campaign strategies, but in the instincts of a primitive part of the human brain? New research I conducted with rhesus macaque monkeys suggests that when it comes to decisions like voting, people are not nearly as rational as they would like to believe. It’s easy to associate instinctual reactions – like the fight-or-flight response or reflexively pulling away from a hot surface –…