When we purchase a car, we do not evaluate every possible feature of the car.  Instead, we hone down on a handful of things we care about. For some its brand name, others performance.  Some care about price while others worry about efficiency.  Our brain gets rid of all the noise and focuses on a tiny amount of information that we care about.

However, does that work in politics?  I think not. In fact, this skill of taking shortcuts that helps us survive in the real world likely make us horrible voters.  In real life if I do not know anything about subwoofers then I ask my buddy who does.   In politics, political parties become our buddies.  You no longer need to know the candidate, just check the party. 

It’s worse.  When we buy a car, we use the shortcut to simplify Math.  In politics, we use shortcuts to skip Math altogether! 

People are not very gifted when it comes to critical and logical thinking.  Our brains evolved for quick and crude decisions, not for deep analysis.  After all, we are a species who actually get cured on placebos if we are told these are expensive drugs.  We find that same wine tastes better when we pay $90 for it than when we pay $10 for it.  We just aren’t as rational as we think we are. 

In a paper written in 2004, the Princeton political scientists Christopher Alchen and Larry Bartels estimate:

2.8 million people voted against Al Gore in 2000 because their states were too dry or too wet” as a consequence of that year’s weather patterns.

Any one of these States would have given Gore the presidency.  Sounds weird?  It’s not:

Eighty-six per cent of likely voters in that election knew that the Bushes’ dog’s name was Millie; only fifteen per cent knew that Bush and Clinton both favoured the death penalty. It’s not that people know nothing. It’s just that politics is not what they know.

I had to stay in Washington, DC for a couple of months in 2008.  To be efficient, I got a short-term lease with a roommate, a very conservative one.  He cornered me one day about the Canadian Healthcare system: “I just don’t want a bureaucrat telling me what doctor to use”.  I tried to explain that actually it’s the American system where the insurance company tells you who you can use, not the Canadian system.  Then he went off on other misconceptions and how the US system was the “best” in the world.  Being annoyingly patriotic, I corrected him on some stats (Canadians have lower child immortality rates, live longer, have almost no medical bankruptcies [largest cause of bankruptcy in the US] and yet the Canadian government spends less on healthcare than the US government does.  That does not even include what private businesses and individuals spend [my employer paid $18,000 / year in healthcare insurance for my family]).  He wrote off all the stats and the conversation turned to how ‘immigrants were stealing American jobs’ and since I fit that profile (being a Canadian working temporarily in the United States), it was my cue to take off. 

It was a truly insightful conversation for me.  Here was a person who considered himself informed making completely uninformed stereotypical comments.  I do not think he is in a minority.  Facts did not matter, buzz words did.  People truly do vote based on anecdotes, personal impressions, buzz words or completely arbitrary and irrelevant points.  Check out some posters in my other blog here and here and here.  These are people protesting Obama’s healthcare proposal.  

Think quickly about the first image or impression that comes to your mind when you hear “Conservative politician” or “Liberal Political Activist”?  In these cases we are perhaps better off dropping the labels altogether.  Scientists have found that once people make an impression, for whatever reason, their brains does everything it can to reinforce that impression. Our subconscious goes as far as to find patterns when none exist and make us ignore patterns when they do exist. 

Neuroscientists actually talk about ‘Bill Clinton’ cells.  They exist in medial temporal lobe and fire whenever one sees a picture of Bill Clinton, hear his voice or read his name.  We have similar neurons for other people we are familiar with.  This combines with the fact that the brain only computes with probabilities while we consciously do not understand probabilities very well turn us into species well suited for quick decisions that optimize survival but poorly designed for deep analysis of complex policy issues. 

It may be worth going on a little tangent to see how brain actually deals with complex information:

[The brain] makes important decisions by having sizable groups of neurons compete with each other—a shouting match between the lion neurons and the tabby cat neurons in which the accidental silence (or spontaneous outburst) of a few nerve cells is overwhelmed by thousands of others.  The winners silence the losers so that ambiguous, and possibly misleading, information is not sent to other brain areas. 
[Source: Discover Magazine]

In fact, Sejnowski, in a paper, concludes that “the evidence is overwhelming that the brain computes with probability.”  Why is that a bad thing? For survival it is not.  When early humans encountered a Saber-tooth Tiger for the first time, those who survived were the ones who quickly judged the Tiger for its teeth (essentially stereotyped it), rather than getting to know it better before reaching a conclusion.  However, in the modern world this ability to take quick shortcuts make us very poor decision makers.  This is why stereotyping and prejudices is so deeply entrenched into our societies. We are hardwired to make quick judgements without investigating facts. 

This leads to people supporting inconsistent policies.  Often people who argues for assault rifle ownership based on individual rights (over community safety) has no problem with the government spying to enhance security (an act that requires giving precedence to security over individual liberty).  It is because their parties (buddies) tell them to.  A recent article for The American Project states:

When people are asked whether they favour Bush’s policy of repealing the estate tax, two-thirds say yes—even though the estate tax affects only the wealthiest one or two per cent of the population.

There is nothing wrong with that belief, except the article also states:

Repeal is supported by sixty-six per cent of people who believe that the income gap between the richest and the poorest Americans has increased in recent decades, and that this is a bad thing. And it’s supported by sixty-eight per cent of people who say that the rich pay too little in taxes.

Numbers do not add up.  Is it a wonder that Americans constantly complain about the gap between rich and poor and yet continue to choose policies that transfer wealth to a small fraction of the population?  Canadians are a bit better, I think, but not by much.  I am specifically picking American examples because I do not want to offend people by citing Canadian examples (it’s not that I am not okay with offending people, it’s just that once people feel like I have done a personal attack, they will stop reading my arguments and get defensive).

I think that’s why labels are used so often (and I hate labels).  “Liberals”, “conservatives”, “right winger” etc. are all terms used to lump people into pre-defined buckets because most of us are too lazy, or too tired, to spend much effort really understanding policy differences.

“Brown” is a very popular name in Ohio politics. An unknown candidate a few years ago controversially changed his last name to Brown and, wait for it, actually won the election.

Cialdini in Influence talks about how studies have found that people vote for candidates they identify with. This association can be racial, professional, culture or any of a number of factors that do not have anything to do with real political policy issues.  Heck, taller candidates get more votes than shorter candidates.  Candidates with names that are similar to voters get more votes.  It’s all bizarre, but it’s all true. 

What is the solution?  As a society we educate our children in Mathematics, science and language from an early age.  We must also educate our children in politics from earlier on as well.  If we are to have a vibrant democracy then we must change our education system to create a vibrant, informed and involved constituency.  Otherwise we will continue to have masses that are easily controlled by political parties.