We shun rationality and seek as little information as possible when making judgments, the experts assert. Instead, individuals use strategic shortcuts, also known as rules of thumb or heuristics, to decide.

Posted but not written by: Louis Sheehan

As the 2008 U.S. presidential election approaches, tens of millions of voters have to make up their minds. They face the task of sifting through media reports, televised debates, political advertisements, campaign literature and conversations with family and friends to identify a candidate who best reflects their political views.

That just may be too much to ask, though. As political scientists have long lamented, the general public knows depressingly little about politics. Most Americans can identify the president but barely half know the name of even one cabinet member and only one-third correctly identify their two U.S. senators or their congressional representative. In surveys, roughly half of registered voters display little understanding of how government works or of current political issues.

Even if a voter knew enough to evaluate each presidential candidate’s positions on diverse issues, he or she would still need to tally pros and cons on those issues for each candidate and determine who most deserved support. Decision researchers in various fields have long favored this exhaustive, coldly logical approach, even if only as an ideal that less methodical thinkers should strive for.

Yet according to many psychologists, people will never think that way. We shun rationality and seek as little information as possible when making judgments, the experts assert. Instead, individuals use strategic shortcuts, also known as rules of thumb or heuristics, to decide. The latter term, of Greek origin, means “serving to find out or discover.” Heuristics require minimal mental effort but prompt irrational and biased judgments — or at least so say some psychologists.

Political scientists generally assume just the opposite. They regard heuristics as tools for the average citizen to fashion reasonably accurate political judgments out of sparse civic knowledge.

A recent experimental innovation promises to better illuminate heuristics’ strengths and weaknesses. Researchers now can track how volunteers decide whom to vote for during mock presidential election campaigns. Results so far indicate that well-informed voters employ heuristics better than they do extensive information analyses to select a candidate who best reflects their own views. In contrast, poorly informed voters experience problems in picking appropriate candidates, especially when using rules of thumb.

In general, rational folk who seek as much information as possible about candidates’ positions on many different issues tend to make poorer decisions about whom to support in mock campaigns than do those who follow simple heuristics. These rules of thumb include choosing candidates based on what political party they belong to or which organizations endorse them.

“At least in politics, more information does not always result in better decisions,” says political scientist Richard Lau of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. “In fact, it often results in worse decisions.”

Other new research suggests that heuristics based solely on certain emotional reactions to candidates, such as admiration and contempt, also guide voting decisions surprisingly well.

12-minute campaigns

Although political scientists typically use surveys to examine voters’ attitudes about political issues and candidates, Lau and colleague David Redlawsk of the University of Iowa in Iowa City take a different approach. They use computers to model campaigns and track how people actually decide whom to vote for in mock elections.

Lau and Redlawsk revised the classic “information board” that has long been used in psychology and marketing to study decision making. An information board looks much like the game board for the television show Jeopardy, with a matrix of columns and rows of boxes that conceal information. Columns on the board are headed by various alternatives, such as a series of political candidates. Rows are labeled with different attributes, such as experience and stands on issues.

In the updated version, volunteers uncover information that they want to learn by clicking a box on the screen. Researchers record what information gets examined, the order in which it’s retrieved and how long it’s perused. Over the past seven years, the two investigators’ findings based on the method have stirred much interest at political science conferences.

Lau and Redlawsk’s “dynamic process-tracing” method uses the information board format to mimic the overwhelming flow of information during presidential campaigns. This approach features a mock primary campaign with six candidates, two Democrats and four Republicans or vice versa, followed by a general election campaign between each party’s nominee. Volunteers register with a party, vote in that party’s primary and then cast ballots in the general election.

The primary campaign lasts about 20 minutes. The general election unfolds over 12 minutes.

During a campaign, columns of boxes on what looks like an information board scroll down a computer screen and disappear, replaced by others at the top of the screen. Participants thus have access to only a fraction of the total information pool at any one time. As in real campaigns, some types of candidate information, such as poll results, appear more often than others do, such as endorsements and issue statements.

access

Voting Behavior and Emotional HeuristicsEmotions, specifically admiration and contempt for a politician, mirrored voters' stated preference better than political party affiliation in a study of 70 voters before the 2004 election, suggesting that these emotions are often used as shortcuts when choosing a candidate. Click on the picture to view a larger version.J. Korenblat (source: Wang, et al., J. Behavioral Decision Making, 2008

At regular intervals, a 20-second political advertisement from one of the candidates takes over the computer screen.

Similar to most voters, no one in the study can read and consider every bit of information presented during these mock campaigns, much less compare candidates on every political attribute.

If a participant employs a particular heuristic, such as paying special attention to which groups endorse different candidates, then Lau and Redlawsk can see whether that person consistently clicks on endorsements during a campaign.

Before the mock campaign, researchers survey each volunteer’s political attitudes to determine the candidate that most closely aligns with each volunteer’s views — thus the best voting choice.

In a groundbreaking 2001 study that launched the real-time analysis of how people make voting choices, Lau and Redlawsk found that nearly all of 657 eligible voters, ages 18 to 84, used heuristics at least some of the time in determining which mock candidate to support. Available shortcuts included relying on a candidate’s party affiliation, making assumptions about a candidate’s ideology based on party affiliation, checking candidate endorsements, tracking poll leaders and judging candidates based on their physical appearance in photographs.

Using shortcuts — especially the tracking of endorsements — allowed most politically sophisticated volunteers, as determined in a survey, to choose and vote for the candidate who best represented their views. That proportion dipped to a bare majority among those who didn’t use heuristics.

Unlike informed voters, politically naïve volunteers usually failed to vote in their own best interests if they used heuristics. Uninformed participants did better when they avoided using rules of thumb, identifying the best-suited candidate about half the time.

Posted but not written by: Louis Sheehan