This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: A core assumption in any democracy is that citizens with access to information will make reasoned decisions on political candidates and policy issues. But a new study by UC Berkeley social scientists finds that Americans usually don't consider the full scope of difficult issues, instead basing their opinions on mental shortcuts that sidestep complexity.
The paper offers striking insight into the differences in cognitive reasoning patterns among Americans. While some people in the study did closely analyze a range of issues before coming to an opinion, others did a quick back-of-the-napkin tally of pluses and minuses or, even more commonly, based their opinions on just one factor, the authors found. "When people make complicated choices with many considerations—which political candidate to support, which immigrant they would rather admit to the country, which climate policy they prefer—we tend to assume they're weighing all the factors," said Berkeley political scientist Kirk Bansak.
But, he added, "we find that most of them aren't. Most commonly, people rely on a mental shortcut, effectively deciding based on the single factor they care about most and largely ignoring the rest." For example, when asked to choose between two fictional U.S. Senate candidates based on age, gender, race, education, military experience and political experience, many of the study participants would make their decision based on just one of those factors.
That doesn't mean that people are irrational, said co-author Nidhi Banavar, a Berkeley cognitive scientist. "The kind of rationality that we define in the paper is quite different from what many humans actually do in real life," she explained. "We have these amazing brains, but they're not the infinite computational machines that would be necessary in order to do the kind of 'rational' thinking we imagine in our paper." Still, the findings have clear implications for politics and political communication.
For example, Banavar said, if a leader knows that public opinion on climate change is dominated by pocketbook concerns to the exclusion of other issues, then that single factor might weigh heavily in political advertising. Complex science issues, meanwhile, might be downplayed. The paper, "Classifying Strategy Use in Multi-Attribute Subjective Choice: Application to Conjoint Experiments in Political Science," is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Bansak is an associate professor of political science; Banavar is a postdoctoral researcher in political science. The foundational ideals of American democracy grew from the Enlightenment era some three centuries ago. Central to that framework was a belief that humans, being rational, are capable of governing themselves—and justified in demanding political power.
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