A novel study by University of California Berkeley scholars Nadhi Banavar and Kirk Bansak finds that when Americans are presented with complex decisions on immigration, climate change or political candidates, they often avoid difficult reasoning.
Instead of considering all of the relevant factors, people more often take a mental shortcut: They decide based on the single factor they care about most, while largely ignoring the rest.
Banavar and Bansak have developed a new model for tracking the cognitive shortcuts that many people use in developing their political opinions. It offers a 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 plusses and minuses, or even more commonly based their opinions on just one factor, the authors found.
That doesn’t mean that people are irrational, said co-author Nidhi Banavar, an Indian American postdoctoral researcher in political science at Berkeley. “The kind of rationality that we define in 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’ we imagine in our paper.”
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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.
Their paper, “Classifying Strategy Use in Multi-Attribute Subjective Choice: Application to Conjoint Experiments in Political Science,” was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Social scientists have long studied human decision-making at the aggregate level. Banavar and Bansak set out to build a new kind of cognitive model, a complex tool that can enable researchers to see an individual’s decision-making mid-process, in detail.
The model doesn’t give them a view into the minds of their research subjects, but the researchers can study hundreds or thousands of decisions by an individual; from these patterns, they can perceive the values and reasoning processes that shape their decisions.
In all, nearly 3,800 people were involved in the study. Each participant sat at a computer screen, and the computer generated a random set of choices in three areas: which migrants they would rather admit to the United States, which Senate primary candidate they would rather vote for, and which climate policy package they would prefer the United States to adopt.
The results were striking: In 68% of the cases, study participants used shortcuts and did not deeply assess all six factors when choosing between hypothetical Senate candidates, migrants or climate policies.
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Nearly 54% showed a pattern of making choices dominated by one of the six factors. Just under 30% used a comprehensive evaluation of all six factors — a rational assessment, without any shortcuts.
Interestingly, Banavar said, a majority of participants did not consistently stay with the same strategy. Some might rely on just one factor in choosing a climate policy, while more fully weighing all the factors in deciding which migrant to admit.
“You can’t put people into buckets to say, ‘Okay, this is someone who’s actually only going to care about only one thing,’” she said. “People are actually relating differently to each of these different domains and choosing to use different levels of effort, for want of a better term.”
The new research shows that individuals often base their opinions on a single factor, and that can create a clearer picture of what people want in public policy, and why they want it. And that understanding, Banavar said, can shape the policy process — and political communication.
If leaders present issues in layers of complexity, “how much are people going to read or listen to that?” she asked. “What is the thing that’s really important to them, given a particular issue? That’s completely lost when you don’t think about the decision-making process.”
Arun Kumar is an Editor-at-Large at The American Bazaar. He can be reached at editor@americanbazaaronline.com
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