Political Communication as Epistemic Consumption: A Neuroeconomic Perspective

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to contextualize and unify existing interdisciplinary literature by introducing the concepts of a non-semantic type of communication, namely pragmatic communication. Despite the utility of cognitively deducing the connotative and denotative meaning of the message we also propose that communication without semantics contains a so called expectancy violation utility which causes neurophysiological changes that help the receiver to reduce the uncertainty (or prediction errors) about its environment. Increasing the uncertainty of the environment where the public lives, would create the tendency for the publics to prefer the more surprising messages, that is, more information rich political messages. This uncertainty reduction with uncertainty seeking behavior illustrates the shift from exploitative into explorative behavior of the audience which indirectly impacts the value of the political message, by making the political message obsolete. Keywords: non-semantic type of communication, communication theory, verbal and non-verbal communications, semantic analysis, Barack Obama, etc.