If It Is “Them” Voters’ Fault — Can We Help by Improving their Knowledge Base? — Probably Not, Say the Findings from a Clever Political Science Experiment

03 January 2013

Today’s topic is about voting irrationality — and it follows up on yesterday’s theme about our self-indulgent lack of economic self-discipline in government

Sociological, psychological, and historical evidence indicates that we are literally wired to be stupid. Where “stupid” is defined as manifesting an inability to act appropriately in the face of threatening problems.

A recent political science study indicates that we continue to make dumb political decisions, even when experimentally incentivized to use our brain power more capably.

The bottom line is that people are easily manipulated by lying politicians and random events. We fail to fire politicians who have objectively bad records. And we reward leaders for accomplishments that they had nothing to do with.

In a word, we’re crazy.

Bear with me — I am not abrasively calling people (myself included) pejorative names

Until we more explicitly recognize that our perceptions, and the abbreviated analyses we make based on them, are flawed — “we ain’t gonna go nowhere especially good.”

Background — most of the time, human perceptions and gut analyses do not equate to Truth

I frequently write about aspects of this:

(a) Even without bias, proving anything “for sure” is really difficult.

See, for example:

here (regarding the statistical basis of knowledge)

here (making mistaken assumptions an inescapable part of the scientific process)

here (the inertia of public ignorance)

(b) Even when we acknowledge the statistical hurdles that confront persuasively getting to Truth, our psychological biases and/or skewed cognitive perceptions frequently result in methodologically incorrect statistical manipulations, deliberately distorted and weighted facts, and/or scientifically questionable causation analyses.

See, for example:

here (regarding introduced distortions in statistical data)

here (how financial greed twists medical research and clinical guidelines)

here (transparency is not enough to eliminate unscientific findings in medical research)

here (deliberately deceptive medical research at Duke University)

here (medical research is now so widely distorted that the national Institute of Medicine is alarmed)

(c) More generally, the fact is that the human brain — although appropriately wired to keep us alive during sabre toothed cat confrontations — is not wired to help us make objectively sound decisions regarding how to confront equally real, but less immediately present threats.

See, for example:

here (regarding our irrational defense of institutions that don’t work)

here (an example of how preying on human irrationality works, even in patent court)

Our current difficulties in:

(i) fashioning American political and economic policies that will last more than a few months

(ii) confronting the implications of climate change —

exemplify the human propensity for engaging in brainless complacence.

Which brings us to the political science experiment that revealed persistently dysfunctional irrationality in the political context.

Citation — to the political science experiment

Gregory A. Huber, Seth J. Hill, and Gabriel S. Lenz, Sources of Bias in Retrospective Decision Making: Experimental Evidence on Voters’ Limitations in Controlling Incumbents, American Political Science Review 106(4): 720-741, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0003055412000391 (November 2012)

What the researchers did

The authors created a game-like political world to test how simulated economic events and pretend political rhetoric influenced their human subjects’ voting behavior:

Huber, Hill and Lenz asked around 4000 citizens to play a series of games assessing the performance of fictional politicians.

As they played, they experienced changes in their earnings.

The experiments also manipulated whether they won or lost in a lottery, when they learned about an upcoming election, and the rhetoric surrounding the election.

What the experiment showed

From the Cambridge University Press release:

They [the experimental subjects] tended to punish or reward the incumbent based on whether or not they had won or lost a lottery, and gave greater weight to earnings closer to the election when they learned about the election closer to it or after certain rhetorical statements.

They persisted in this irrational behavior even when it was made clear to them that their fictional incumbent had had nothing to do with the lottery and that events closer to the election were no more informative of the incumbent's true performance than events further from the election.

Huber said:

"Our results suggest severe limitations in humans' ability to accurately and impartially judge the performance of politicians.

“This is a worrisome finding for democratic accountability because it creates a breeding ground for politicians to manipulate their electorate."

"The findings also raise a warning about the adequacy of civic education programs and media coverage of elections to help citizens to accurately judge the performance of their representatives.

“Understanding how to improve voter decision-making may have important implications for democracy."

Implications

From the press release:

This in turn makes voters vulnerable to being manipulated by politicians.

The findings suggest that incumbents who associate themselves with good news for which they bear no responsibility, implement policies that generate good news close to elections at the expense of overall voter welfare, and use rhetoric that encourages people to focus on how they feel in the here and now, ignoring the long-term, could benefit at the ballot box.

Sound familiar?

The moral? — Human irrationality is why capable leadership and sound political ethics are critical to achieving “progress”

If politicians define themselves solely as self-interested vote getters, they do nothing to advance the human condition. Our irrational self-destruction continues.

People admire History’s rare examples of socially effective democratic leaders because they managed to combine:

(a) the skillful muck wallowing that is politically necessary to becoming a top vote-getter

with

(b) the personal courage and professional integrity that chases more difficult and elevating accomplishments.

In this, it may be that human progress depends less on History’s propensity for carrying someone to top of its recurrent “Readiness Waves,” than on genuine leaders seeing, responding to, and molding those Waves.

Abraham Lincoln, for example, was not simply a predictable product of his times. His soul’s ambitious integrity was a vital ingredient in the exceptional accomplishments for which we still honor him. The same was true of George Washington.

We are, today, an irrational and cacophonous wave (as human beings always are)— awaiting someone who demands and manifests more than our lowest common denominator. Which is why I place such an emphasis on quality leadership in these pages.

PeteFree.com

If It Is “Them” Voters’ Fault — Can We Help by Improving their Knowledge Base? — Probably Not, Say the Findings from a Clever Political Science Experiment