Heuristics and Political Decision Making

Crossposted at OpenLeft

Yesterday, Chris wrote a post that looked at a recently published paper on heuristics and politics, which he described as a "new approach toward how voters make decisions". The paper described a few psychological phenomena, and came to the conclusion that people do not make rational decisions in politics, but rather rationalize their rather irrational political decisions.  Chris then went on to discuss how he thought the study related to the behavior of supporters of various candidates, including Gore supporters:

At first blush, this strikes as something I once called Creeping Dear Leader Syndrome online, to describe a phenomenon where people back a candidate and then either change their issue positions to match the candidate, or use contorted, hermeneutical reading of candidate positions to turn those positions into something they are not. It something you see in the comments of blog posts on the 2008 Democratic nomination campaign all the time. Even though it is not an "issue position," exactly, one of the most gratuitous examples is how Gore supporters seems to be able to consistently read Gore's statements that he has no intention of running as actually meaning that he is, after all, certain to run. People invent narratives and facts surrounding the candidates they support, in order to convince themselves that their beliefs and their chosen candidate's beliefs are identical. Unless I am mistaken, in political science circles this is a phenomenon known as "projection."

Well, Chris was wrong on multiple points in this post, and so I thought I'd address a few of those mistakes, including his mischaracterization of why Gore supporters believe that the former Vice President will run.

First, and most importantly, there's really nothing in the quoted paper that is all that "new." The role of heuristics in political decision making has been theorized about for decades or longer, at least since Walter Lippmann, the father of modern Communications Studies, wrote his scathing review of Democracy, Public Opinion, in 1922, which the authors quote from in their conclusion (as do most scholars who study political decision making). Heuristics (which are basically short-cuts to decisions, are usually best described as shortcuts to decisions, that often occur due to cognitive biases) have also been studied extensively since 70s, when Nobel Lauriate Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tverskey (who would likely have shared the prize with Kahneman if he was still alive) came out with their initial groundbreaking studies, which showed the existence of a few well known heuristics in a lab setting. And while the authors of the paper acknowledge the extensive research done in this field, they claim that it hasn't really been applied to politics, but this is not exactly true, as a simple Google Scholar search reveals.

Chris the mislabels the heuristic responsible for the behaviors of many candidate supporters as "projection" and he also conflates this cognitive bias with the one that he believes leads to people, like yours truly, to believe that Al Gore is running.

For the record, this is a good working definition of projection:

Projection is when someone is threatened by or afraid of their own impulses so they attribute these impulses to someone else.

The heuristic that seems to best describe the phenomenon that the paper discussed is known as Anchoring:

Anchoring or focalism is a cognitive bias that describes the common human tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor," on one trait or piece of information when making decisions.

During normal decision making, individuals anchor, or overly rely, on specific information or a specific value and then adjust to that value to account for other elements of the circumstance. Usually once the anchor is set, there is a bias toward that value.

(On an interesting side note, this heuristic implies that it is almost always better to start negotiating from an extreme position and gradually moderate as you go on)

Now, I can't speak for all Gore supporters, but I would definitely say that in my case, my cognitive bias might better be labbled as Wishful Thinking, which is "he formation of beliefs and making decisions according to what might be pleasing to imagine instead of by appealing to evidence or rationality.". I would argue that this isn't really true either, as I don't believe that Gore actually is running, and I firmly believe that the only way he will run is if people, and espescially bloggers, start to believe that it is a real possibility, and that he would have a great chance to win if he did. But hey, I guess I also exhibit wishful thinking when I say I think we can have universal health care, a solution to the global climate crisis, and a political system where money doesn't have such a distorting effect. Some might call that "idealism" and "ideology", and I most certainly work towards these "wishful" goals every day, but I guess it depends on where you stand

There are two other issues in regards to heuristics that I also think are worth mentioning.

First, it is a bit ironic that today Chris has a piece which looks at how news coverage effects evaluation of candidates, since this is, by far the most researched heuristic in regards to political decision making. I have written extensively about this in other places, and this post is way too long as it is, but this phenomenon is known as the Agenda Setting Effect (researched most prominently by Shanto Iyengar, chair of Stanford's Political Communications Lab), and is likely caused by the Availability Heuristic. Simply stated, people tend to make decisions based off of whatever information comes to mind easiest/quickest, and the news has a very large impact on what information is freshest, and thus easiest to access, in our minds.

The second thing that you might find interesting (well, at least I do), is that political heuristics are not fully developed until people are in their mid-to-late-twenties (due to other psychological features). This is why I personally feel that progressives need to focus largely on youth outreach and persuasion, and why I have dedicated my life and career to doing just this.

If you'd like to read more on these two topics, let me point you to two items I wrote as part of my masters thesis, Keys to a Future Majority, which are posted at Future Majority, the progressive youth politics blog I help run:

Keys to a Future Majority - Reminiscence Bumps, Collective Memory, and Generations

Keys to a Future Majority - The Agenda-Setting Effect, Priming, And Youth Voting