It’s a dead heat in the polls, and the fact that so many will argue after the vote that the winner was inevitable implies that they have front-loaded arguments to support both outcomes. The solution is contained in the psychological processes that underlie the bias itself, studies suggest. It also breeds contempt for others’ judgments when those go south, which some inevitably do, especially in politics and diplomacy. The downside of such distortion is not just the shock of being unmasked, when a rude friend or spouse points out your record of bad predictions. This means that the past becomes a lot more ‘knowable’ than it was in reality, and hence hindsight bias.” “That means to tell a neat story, where all the pieces fit together. Vohs, the University of Minnesota psychologist, said in an e-mail. “What consciousness does is tell the most compelling story it can come up with,” Dr. “Indeed, even after you’ve written about it 100 times.” Tetlock, a professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. “Even after it has been explained to you 100 times, you can still fall prey” to the bias, said Philip E. In both studies, participants remembered their initial predictions as more accurate when judged more than a week after the fact than in the first few days after. Simpson would be acquitted in his murder trial.
Bryant, found a similar pattern in students estimating the likelihood that O. The students identified themselves mostly as independents, with equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats.Īn experiment led by the one of the same Loyola researchers, Fred B. Their estimates of what a friend would have guessed showed no such inflation. The students’ estimates ranged from about 50 percent 11 days before the decision to about 41 percent a few days before, as the news media were trending toward acquittal.īut 11 days after the Senate voted to acquit the president, the study found, the same students inflated their original estimates by about 10 percentage points. In an experiment conducted during the Clinton administration, for instance, two psychologists at Loyola University in Chicago had 34 students predict the likelihood that the president would be convicted in his impeachment trial. “You need to give them an out for their ‘voters’ remorse.’ It’s not them, you see, it was him.” “As the challenger, you need to win over some of those voters,” Mr. Bush and co-founder of No Labels, a nonprofit devoted to bipartisanship.
Of course the consulate in Benghazi needed beefed-up security.Ĭampaigns exploit this instinct, particularly when appealing to voters who second-guess decisions of someone they put in office, said Mark McKinnon, a former adviser to President George W. Of course it was clear that Saddam Hussein was bluffing about weapons of mass destruction. People retrofit their opinions and judgments to the evidence, in this case to an election result, but just as often to a political decision (or nondecision) that went wrong. The most obvious carry-over to politics is confirmation bias, the reflexive instinct to begin with an assumption - say, that poor people are lazy - and notice only evidence that’s supportive, like malingering, ignoring the efforts of the rest of the $5-an-hour night cleaning crew. And so it is, to some extent - presenting some of the same opportunities for self-correction. If politics is individual psychology writ large, then thinking about politics should be subject to the same shortfalls and quirks as thinking about anything else. They have dug into the field over the past decade or so, finding a wide-open arena in which to test results from lab studies and in some cases drawing interest from campaign strategists. Long the province of political scientists, historians and pollsters, voters’ behavior has more recently attracted the attention of psychologists.
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