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How Voter Shortsightedness Skews Elections
sciencehabit writes "'Are you better off than you were 4 years ago?' Ronald Reagan's famous question in the U.S. presidential election of 1980 is generally a good yardstick for picking a candidate, or at least for judging a leader's economic policies. But few voters follow it. Instead, they are swayed by economic swings in the months leading up to the election, often ignoring the larger trends. Why are we so shortsighted? A psychological study of voting behavior suggests an answer and points to a simple fix. ... Healy and Lenz challenged their subjects to evaluate hypothetical governments based on slightly varying information. For example, some received information expressed as yearly income while others received the same information expressed as a yearly growth rate. The same information in a plot of steadily increasing average personal income over 3 years—$32,400, $33,100, $33,800—can also be expressed as a steadily decreasing rate of growth—3%, 2.3%, 2.1%. That did the trick. Just changing the units of the data was enough to cure voter fickleness. When economic trends were expressed as yearly income rather than rates of change, the subjects made accurate judgments. But if the same information was expressed as a change over time—the bias reappeared."
News at 10
are you better off now than you were 4 years ago
that drives my selection. The matter for me is closer to
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
None of us is as dumb as all of us.
But that's exactly what this sort of thing shows is not the case! The data about cognitive biases is robust. This one is a variation of the framing effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_effect_(psychology) and the data shows that even smart people as individuals don't do well on such tests. We are all as individuals subject to cognitive biases. What's even worse is that knowing about cognitive biases can even be counterproductive http://lesswrong.com/lw/he/knowing_about_biases_can_hurt_people/ because we are much more prone to see them in other people than in ourselves even though we're all subject to them.
The voters make decisions based on the information they are fed. Not the information they *GATHER* by and large, because that is an active process. Most people seem to tune in to the media outlets that favor their political leanings, which are driven by the corporate and special interests that own these media empires. Whether your corporation is Fox, MSNBC, or American Public Media, people are really being spoon-fed an official line that serves somebody else's self-interest, packaged in a way that makes them feel like this media empire puts its own self-interest below that of its audience.
Part of the problem is that news is a form of entertainment, and in the USA at least, news outlets are legally allowed to deliberately lie to you. Journalists are hypnotists, plain and simple, and if they do tell the truth it is because it happens to align with their employers' interests that day.
If people were given the tools to understand this game during their formative years, they might be more willing to take the time to independently research the issues they care about, but even this is a stretch. After a long day at the office, most folks want to just sort of zonk out and, tired and often filled with alcohol, the news is turned on and they absorb the day's "news" without a single functioning critical thought neuron in action.
If I were naive I would suggest some legislative fix to this but knowing how the legislative process works, and its typical results, this would almost inevitably lead to a much worse scenario than that which is being played out right now.
The fact that a large majority of voters make judgments on what happens in the immediate past (i.e. 3-4 months) prior to an election, rather than the entire term of office (2, 4, or 6 years for various US Congress/Presidents) is well documented, so no surprise here.
Much of that has to do with the difficulty virtually all people have distilling a complex, hugely multivariant problem, into easily understood metrics and views. That's not going to change, because even a super genius is going to only be able to accurately remember a half-dozen major points, while there may be as many as several DOZEN relevant metrics/issues that you probably can consider important.
The proposed solution in the paper is yet another form of a simplification and lie, NOT a real solution. The simple answer is that I see no indication that the claimed "yearly growth" rate is any more accurate than the absolute income. Do the grow rates take into account inflation? (I see no indication they do) What about changes in the job market over those years? What about overall economic indicators? I.e. if the average income managed to grow ANY over the period 2007-2009 (in the middle of the most severe recession in 80 years), then that a huge accomplishment vs say merely keeping up with inflation in 2003. The authors are merely substituting one questionably useful statistic with another (of the same dubious relevance).
Never trust someone selling you a simple numerical answer to a complex problem. Politicians and Statisticians are both extremely adept at contriving lots of meaning from simple numbers. There's a reason this post is titled the way it is.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
the researchers themselves dont...from the abstract:
blame the candidates and the news media...both are obviously not doing their jobs.
candidates, because...holy crap they're supposed to be *running* for office. they can't blame others for everything...they are responsible for how they present their case.
news media...obviously idiots. If you want to call people stupid, call ***NEWS PRODUCERS*** stupid fucking idiots. You can thrown in the TV company executives in there too. They have *no idea* what they are doing in regards to the 4th Estate & informing the populace.
I have to fault SoulSkill & all nerds here as well. Its a cop out to say "all people are idiots" as a solution or explanation to every problem. It's reductive and unworthy of our industry. Blaming the user by default *hurts our industry* because it alienates us from the users, and from our own work.
Systems need correction. Blaming the people the system is designed to serve when a feedback loop occurs is illogical!
Thank you Dave Raggett
Informative? Seriously?
LynnwoodRooster seems to have been betting that by stating a lie while providing a couple of links (that refute the lie) most people will assume that that the links actually support it.
If you follow the GINI link you will find that the both the pre-tax and after-tax GINI DID NOT INCREASE AT ALL during the Clinton years! The rise under Reagan went flat, then resumed its rise again under Bush.
Also actually look at that median HOUSEHOLD (not individual) curve LR links to. By the end of the Reagan-Bush era it was down to $48K (from 45.5K at the start), a far less impressive 5.5% over 12 years, and the whole reason for the rise was due to the second adult in the household going to work - since actual wages were flat.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Then where **do** they get their information?
Let's hear it. List it out. Explain an alternative.
I am open to what you have to say but I know that whatever you say will most likely have the government, a private corporation, and/or the 'news media' involved in how you obtain it in some way.
All 3 of those would get the standard trolling response on /. of, "...pssht...you trust X? your an idiot"
(X being govt, biz, or media)
So stop the nonstop counterpoint bullshit...save that for Nye/Ham...how would someone get reliable information, say, for Hurricane Sandy Relief efforts and if any corruption has turned up???
Hurricane Sandy accountability...how would i get that the 'non-idiot' way?
Thank you Dave Raggett