Let me tell you about my sister-in-law.
She's recently divorced. She has no pension other than Social Security. Her ex-husband got their (mortgaged) home, but at least she's released from the debt. Her car, though, was repossessed a month ago.
So, she is homeless, has no transportation, and her social security nets her less than $1,000 per month after paying for her subsidized health insurance. She's applied for housing assistance, but the waiting list is 12-18 months. She's qualified for $16 per month in food stamps--it's so low because she has no housing expense! In short, she's in abject poverty and has been for at least six months. If we didn't provide her a place to sleep, food, and transportation, she'd be on the streets.
So, you'd think that she supports progressive policies, right?
If so, you'd be 100% wrong.
At dinner last night, she railed against her step-daughter who is a "welfare whore" and has children just live off the state. I gently asked her why, if it's so easy to mooch off welfare, she wasn't living high on the hog at the state's expense instead my expense. (I'm the only wage-earner in our household; her gay brother and my partner is disabled). Her answer? Welfare isn't available to "her kind of people." When pressed, "her kind of people" means "real Americans," i.e., white, conservative Christian, non-immigrant, etc. She at least has the good sense to omit gays from her list of “fake Americans.” The system is "rigged" against "real Americans" like her.
Of course, she voted for Trump in the last election, and is still a huge fan.
Her own lived experience should show her that her right-wing beliefs are delusional. They do not. She's not stupid. She's even not particularly poorly informed. But she's convinced that all those other people are at fault for her situation, stealing what is rightfully hers.
What's going on here?
We could point to lots of things. The relentlessly awful news media, starting with Fox and extending to the horrible local media in Oklahoma. The hate-filled religions that dominate the local culture certainly are a factor: they relish bathing themselves in self-righteous hatred of the "other." Long traditions of "conservative" being "good" and "liberal" being bad are a factor. But these are, I think, peripheral to something deeper involving how humans make decisions. These factors work precisely because they exploit how people make decisions.
Basically, we have two systems for deciding. There's the rational system that gathers data, weighs the evidence, balances positives and negatives, and comes to calculated conclusions. It's a basic premise of democracy and the "marketplace of ideas" that this decision process governs how we vote. All the evidence indicates this is flat wrong.
The other system, the one that we use most of the time, is heuristic and based largely on emotion and "gut feelings." This heuristic system looks instinctively for certain kinds of patterns and reaches conclusions from those rather than from hard evidence.
As humans, we need both systems. Indeed, there is evidence that we can train the heuristic decision process in positive ways. Experienced emergency managers--fire chiefs, police, military commanders--make on-the-spot decisions with incredible accuracy using the "gut feeling" method. But those "gut feelings" are the result of long-term thoughtful immersion in real-world situations. When confronted with a patient in the ER who is coding, there isn't time for a bevy of tests. An experienced ER physician makes the correct choice 90% or of the time. The same is true for the other professionals mentioned above.
But most of the time when we make heuristic decisions, it's not based on this kind of considered immersion. It's more often situational and spontaneous. It's even right 70-80% of the time. Moreover, it's easier to use the heuristic system and usually feels better. A primary example would be the decision on voting. We don't need research to conclude that voting decisions are not based on logic, facts, or evidence, although such research is out there. (The same is true for consumer decisions, but that's another story.) All we have to do is look at Republican success at the polls.
The downside to making heuristic decisions is that they are subject to well-known cognitive biases—the very patterns that the heuristic systems use. Understanding those biases can help explain my sister-in-law's stunning delusions regarding Trump and Republicans. It can also help frame strategies for countering Republican propaganda.
What are some of the biases at work? Here's a short and non-comprehensive list.
Truth Effect Bias. This might be better called repetition bias: repeating a statement, whether it's true or false, has the net effect of making it more believable. Note that Democratic ads last fall that repeated Trump's horrifying lies made those very lies more credible.
Present Bias. This is the tendency to over-value current rewards at the expense of long-term consequences. Global warming deniers, take note.
Negativity Bias. People give more weight to negative feelings than to positive feelings. The notion that it's a winning strategy to "go high when they go low" is flat wrong.
Halo Effect. Overall impressions influence thoughts about that candidates' character or positions. Nominating candidates with high negatives makes elections tougher to win, whether or not the negative impressions are valid. Note that voter turnout for both parties was lower in 2016 than in 2012.
Illusion of Control. The belief that random events can be controlled. The notion that a dying industry like coal is susceptible to change by political action is but one of myriad examples.
Confirmation Bias. The tendency to give weight to evidence that supports already-held beliefs and discount evidence that is contrary to already-held beliefs. This is hallmark of religious voters, especially evangelicals who overwhelming voted for Trump.
Ingroup Bias. We have a tendency to favor the thoughts, ideals, and sentiments of those with whom we most closely identify. See racism, all forms of religious-based discrimination, sexism--including homophobia. Generally, this is "fear of the other," and dovetails with negativity bias. We can recognize this as a hallmark of Republican campaigns.
Loss Aversion. This is the tendency of people to strongly prefer avoiding loss as opposed to acquiring gains. Numerous studies have shown that people feel losses more deeply than gains of the same value. In addition, even when outcomes are identical, people will take greater risks to avoid loss than they will take to acquire gains.
Declinism. This is a special case of loss aversion. We tend to edit our memories of the past to make them rosier than they really were. This bias means that appeals to things getting worse ("declining morals," "increasing crime waves,") plays to loss aversion, a longing for a past that never really existed. "Make America Great Again" is all about loss aversion and declinism.
Each of these no doubt play a role in my sister-in-law's certainty that liberals are "out to get her." Taken together, and relentlessly pursued by the Republican propaganda machine, they have a devastating effect.
We can't "fix this" by getting more people to use rational decision making. It's against human nature and millennia of evolution. What we can and must do, is frame our arguments for progressive candidates to take advantage these very biases.
I take some heart in seeing movement by Democratic politicians to do exactly this. Arguments framed around loss aversion, truth bias, present bias, and negativity bias are all apparent in the current campaign in the healthcare debate. They are working, too, with Republican initiatives getting spectacularly poor ratings. It helps that the facts are also against the Republicans, but facts don't move voters. We live in a system where at least 45% of the voters are unmoved by facts, and that's assuming 100% of Democratic voters are moved by facts, a premise that is almost surely incorrect.
This diary is not about policy. It's about framing and campaigning for progressives and about countering the propaganda of the Right.
Note that both Democrats and Republicans have policies based on the rational decision-making process. The goals are different, however. For the Republicans, the goals are heavily negative: racism, religious intolerance, empowering the powerful and debasing the powerless. Progressive goals center around fairness, cooperation, freedom, opportunity, and responsibility.
But for most voters, policies, values, and goals don’t matter. Anyone who thinks “values” matter to evangelic voters isn’t paying attention, for one glaring example.
Policies are about governing. A political campaign isn’t about governing, it's about marketing. The truth and validity of a goal has nothing to do with marketing that goal. Democrats must have a comprehensive marketing strategy that takes realistic account of what behavioral science tells us about how people make decisions.
This has nothing to do with policy. You can build a scientific marketing strategy to support any set of policies. Republicans have decades of success doing this with execrable polices, values, and goals. Democrats keep making the same mistake over and over, thinking that voters decide based on rational processes. They don't and they are not going to start.
We need to have a marketing strategy designed to win elections, not to win arguments.
I'm just a mathematician, not a behavioral scientist. I can read, though, and there are plenty of peer-reviewed articles out there on how people make decisions. The June issue of Scientific American inspired much of this diary. Our party leaders need to take heed of what science tells us about how people decide. We cannot afford to cede this battleground to the opposition.
