‘The Undoing Project’ extends the academic thread of Michael Lewis’s earlier book, while bringing to life the riveting story of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman.
The Undoing Project extends the academic thread of Michael Lewis’s earlier book, while bringing to life the riveting story of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman.
Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. Courtesy: Penguin Random House
“No one writes with more narrative panache about money and finance,” said the New York Times about Michael Lewis. In his highly-acclaimed Moneyball, Lewis narrated how a poorly-rated baseball team (Oakland Athletics) used data in novel ways to identify market inefficiencies and thereby developed new approaches to playing strategies and player recruitment. The new knowledge brought Oakland astonishing success, and the information model came to be emulated by other teams and, Lewis argued in his book, could be applied to diverse other fields.
Moneyball spurred Lewis to explore the reasons behind market inefficiencies, especially the way the human mind worked in forming judgements and, inevitably, he was led to the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. The Undoing Project extends the academic thread of Lewis’s earlier book, while bringing to life the riveting story of that remarkable pair of Israeli psychologists.
Kahneman and Tversky were both descended from Eastern European rabbis; but in the Holy Land neither believed in god. Both had “shockingly fertile minds” that urged them to study psychology to unearth simple truths of human behaviour. They knew that they were smarter than most and sensed that they were destined for special things. Their similarities, however, ended there, and it remains a mystery how they formed one of the most influential intellectual partnerships of all time. Lewis dissects their complex relationship in this fascinating book.
Two of the brightest stars of Hebrew University in the 1950s, they were markedly different in comportment. Tversky was a swaggering native while Kahneman, scarred by the Holocaust, was a recent immigrant. Tversky was ebullient and cock-sure, while self-doubt and uncertainty were Kahneman’s hallmark. Everyone wanted (in today’s speak) to ‘friend’ the charming and extroverted Tversky, although his was “the most terrifying mind” they had encountered. Kahneman was a pessimist, withdrawn and painfully sensitive to criticism.
Until the day Kahneman invited Tversky to address the students in his psychology class, they had had little to do with each other. Tversky that day had the unprecedented and unsettling experience of not just having his presentation shredded by Kahneman’s interjections but of having to reorient his very worldview.
The regard that Kahneman and Tversky developed for each other at their first encounter led to their coming together a few months later to produce their first paper, ‘Belief in the Law of Small Numbers’ in 1971. Considered one of the most important theses ever written, it underscored the failure of human intuition in making judgements and reaching decisions. Simply put, they wrote that people mistakenly believed that a small sample taken at random would be representative of a large group – that it would have a similar distribution pattern, something that is manifestly not true.
People’s “intuitive expectations are governed by a consistent misperception of the world”, the paper concluded. Even statisticians, who should have known better, commonly succumbed to subjective interpretation of evidence, in other words to biases.
Michael Lewis The Undoing Project Penguin UK, 2017
While their first paper showed how people overlooked statistically correct answers to problems, they next explored the systematic biases or cognitive limitations impairing real-world decision-making. Their research challenged the idea that human beings are rational actors and, exposing the flaws in existing concepts of human behaviour, they proposed more persuasive theories to explain how people make choices. All modern theories of decision-making have been guided by the rules of thumb that they formulated. They termed these “heuristics”.
They argued that when people make judgements they liken whatever they are judging to a representative prototype they bear in their minds. ‘Representativeness’ became the first heuristic. The next, ‘availability’, causes people to believe a familiar scenario to be more probable than it actually is. ‘Anchoring and adjustment’ let people’s ignorance colour their judgement.
Decisions in practically all high-level professional activities, the duo insisted, would be “significantly improved by making experts aware of their own biases, and by development of methods to reduce and counteract the sources of bias in judgement”. Even historians are prone to cognitive biases; to taking whatever facts they have at hand to formulate neat narratives. Lewis describes how Amos once lectured a gathering of historians leaving them “ashen-faced”.
“Eighty percent of doctors don’t think probabilities apply to their patients, just as 95% of married couples don’t believe that the 50% divorce rate applies to them.” Teasing out the frailties of human judgement, Kahneman and Tversky evolved a new approach to economic theory, their collaboration culminating in ‘the prospect theory’ (1979), which became the second most cited paper in all of economics.
Michael Lewis. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Although they continued to publish together until Tversky’s untimely death, their partnership alas unravelled, becoming increasingly fraught in the last years.
While Lewis meticulously maps out the contours of the work Kahneman and Tversky did together, making it comprehensible – even enthralling – to the lay reader, what distinguishes The Undoing Project is the superb portrayal of the extraordinary synergy of two idiosyncratic and disparate geniuses.
“What they were like,” says Lewis, “in every way but sexually, was lovers. They connected with each other more deeply than either had connected with anyone else.” Both were family men, but their wives would admit that their mutual connect was more intense than a marriage. They were both turned on by the other and found each other more interesting than anyone else. “They’d become a single mind.”
Observers recall how Tversky and Kahneman completed each other’s sentences and seemed to think in tandem. Few had an idea of how they worked on their papers, except for noting roars of laughter and whoops of delight that emanated from behind the closed doors of seminar rooms in which the two spent hours together. Their ideas spawned and incubated with such spontaneity that it was impossible to attribute them specifically to either Kahneman or Tversky. In their joint papers they would appear as lead author alternately.
Perhaps the denouement was inevitable. Even they were not immune to the fragilities of the human mind. Tversky was the more brilliant, but without Kahneman’s ideas and intuition his output would have been decidedly less significant. Kahneman, on the other hand, realised that he could do without his partner and was wounded when the popular and out-going Tversky, inadvertently or otherwise, monopolised the limelight and seized the lion’s share of glory for their joint work. The break-up of Kahneman’s marriage and his leaving Israel physically separated the collaborators for the first time and drove a lasting wedge in their relationship.
Ironically, it was while working on ‘the undoing project’ – an exploration of the tendency of people’s minds to spin alternative realities in order to avoid the pain of emotion – that the wedge became unbridgeable. The ideas and sweat behind this project were all Kahneman’s, but Tversky neglected to give him the credit Kahneman expected. Kahneman would later confide that he regarded this as the beginning of the end.
The break had become almost total when Tversky was diagnosed with cancer in 1996 and given, at best, six months to live. Kahneman was the second person he called with the news. In the following months, a shattered Kahneman phoned his friend almost every day. Distraught, disoriented and dishevelled, he delivered the main eulogy at the funeral.
When Tversky, who never craved honours – they came to him unsought – was informed some days before the end that he was on a short-list for the Nobel Prize, he replied, “I assure you the Nobel Prize is not on the list of things I’m going to miss.” Kahneman, who believed that he had long deserved the prize, finally won it in 2002 – for work he had done with Tversky years before.
Govindan Nair is a retired civil servant who lives in Chennai after more than three decades in Uttar Pradesh, Delhi and overseas.
Infinite in All Directions is The Wire‘s science newsletter. Subscribe and receive a digest of the most interesting science news and analysis from around the web every Monday, 10 am.
Infinite in All Directions is The Wire‘s science newsletter. Click here to subscribe and receive a digest of the most interesting science news and analysis from around the web every Monday, 10 am.
Credit: marcelamcgreal/Flickr, CC BY 2.0
Good morning! You’re probably expecting Vasudevan Mukunth, the science editor at The Wire. But I’ll be filling in him for this morning. My name is Thomas Manuel. I’m a writer from Chennai and though I’ve won an award for writing something, I’m not a science-editor of anything. [VM – this award]
Standing as we are, on the shoulders of giants, I have a lot of respect for those who can set up ladders and climb even higher. I myself have other interests. Like, how did these giants get here in the first place? Why are they all old white men? What’s their favourite kind of sandwich?
These interests of mine, lying as they are not in scientific pursuits but rather in what happens in their periphery, are probably because my parents had Frantz Fanon and not Richard Feynman in the family library. Growing up, science (along with many other things including cooking and programming) seemed to occupy a separate magisterium. I’m happy to admit that I’m rectifying that gap but the damage is done. When I think of science, my heart is drawn to its historical roots, its sociological baggage and its philosophical underpinnings.
So, that said, here’s this week’s Infinite in All Directions – about consciousness.
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Things We Don’t Understand #1: The Mind
In a conversation with the philosophers Massimo Pigliucci and Daniel Dennett, the cosmologist Lawrence Krauss joked that he studied physics because it was easy: “If I wanted to do something hard, I’d do consciousness”.
The mind is one of the most interesting frontiers of science today. Each new discovery is carefully dissected, debated, contradicted and, somehow, slowly, progress is made. The intense scrutiny is more than justified – there’s almost no branch of human endeavour that can claim to be disinterested. From self-help pop psychology to linguistics to medicine to economics, the mind matters.
One of the writers I really enjoy reading on the subject is Yohan John, a computational neuroscientist who regularly writes columns for 3QuarksDaily. His essays have ranged from topics such as the power of names and idols to the stickiness of ‘mind-body’ metaphors.
Here’s an excerpt from one of my favourite essays,’Persons all the way down: On viewing the scientific conception of the self from the inside out’:
Among neuroscientists, one of the most well-known cautionary tales is that of phrenology: the 19th century “science” that claimed to be able to peer into your soul by measuring bumps and dents on your head. The idea was that these hills and valleys were signs of size differences in areas dedicated to mental faculties such as “amativeness”, “concentrativeness”, “aquisitiveness”, “wit” and “conscientiousness”. So a bump near your zone of “amativeness” would mean that your brain has allocated additional resources towards the pursuit of love and sex. It all sounds quaint and Victorian — I imagine steampunk authors have taken the idea and run with it.
But if we strip away the old-fashioned terminology, how different is the concept of a brain area for “wit” from the concept of a “cognitive area” in the brain? How different is the idea of a center of “amativeness” from the idea that oxytocin is a love molecule? And is the idea that conscientiousness is baked into the brain any different from the idea that morality or altruism is baked into the genome?
There is a kind of implicit metaphysics underlying the idea of a “brain area for X”, a “neurotransmitter for Y” and a “gene for Z” — we might call it the neo-phrenology of the self. For every psychological state, however complex, the neo-phrenologist assumes that there must be some equivalent entity at the level of brain region, or chemical, or gene.
As someone who’s always going to be looking at science from the outside in, I’m a great admirer of those who can convey the wonder and complexity and limitations of what we know. Especially if they can do it with a neat turn of phrase.
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Why We Can’t Have Nice Things #1: Cognitive Biases
Talking about limitations on what we know, if you haven’t heard of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, you should check out Michael Lewis’ new book on the duo, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds. Here’s an excerpt.
Kahneman and Tversky were psychologists who pioneered the study of the irrationality of the human mind through the documentation and exploration of our mental heuristics and innate biases. You might’ve heard of confirmation bias but what about the conjunction fallacy? Tversky and Kahneman found that the people they tested felt it was less likely that a good tennis player would “lose the first set” than that he would “lose the first set but win the match.” Or to put it in other words, a good tennis player was more likely to win after losing a set than lose a set in the first place. Doesn’t make any sense, right? Well, it doesn’t mathematically but it does feel like if a tennis player was good, he’d be better at comebacks than losing sets.
This kind of work was revolutionary. Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler of Nudge fame referred to Tversky and Kahneman in their recent New Yorker piece as “the Lennon and McCartney of social science”.
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Things We Don’t Understand #2: Reality
Getting back to consciousness, another thing that might be affected is reality itself. Consider cognitive scientist David Hoffman’s theory of reality.
I call it conscious realism: Objective reality is just conscious agents, just points of view. Interestingly, I can take two conscious agents and have them interact, and the mathematical structure of that interaction also satisfies the definition of a conscious agent. This mathematics is telling me something. I can take two minds, and they can generate a new, unified single mind.
I’m not qualified to comment on the theory itself obviously but the reduction to points of view must cheer people in the humanities who have been saying this all along! On a more serious note, there is an interesting question here – is what Hoffman is doing even science?
Watch this video of the conversation between Krauss, Pigliucci and Dennett that I mentioned earlier.
The first question to the trio is whether science has limits. They answer it and move on to answering a whole bunch of other questions. If you’ve ever been to any kind of panel discussion before, you’ll agree that this was a unique event in history. Watch it for the intellectual pyrotechnics.
It might surprise you that when Krauss discusses the limits of science, he isn’t engaging in theoretical physics or any sub-discipline in science, but rather he’s engaging in philosophy, specifically metaphysics. But let philosopher Robert Trigg explain it in a Nautilus article titled Why Science Needs Metaphysics:
Those who say that science can answer all questions are themselves standing outside science to make that claim. That is why naturalism—the modern version of materialism, seeing reality as defined by what is within reach of the sciences—becomes a metaphysical theory when it strays beyond methodology to talk of what can exist. Denying metaphysics and upholding materialism must itself be a move within metaphysics. It involves standing outside the practice of science and talking of its scope. The assertion that science can explain everything can never come from within science. It is always a statement about science.
If this is slightly confusing, don’t worry. Nautilus also published an article called Why Science Should Stay Clear of Metaphysics. It wasn’t a response to Trigg or anything like it. It’s simply the (slightly misleading) title for an interview with philosopher of science Bas van Fraassen, a pioneer of constructive empiricism.
Constructive empiricism is a theory that gains quite a bit of importance if you’re interested in the debates around whether we are moving towards ‘post-empirical science’, no small part of which is due to the progress of string theory. If you’re not familiar with the threat of string theory to the concept of empirical science, the idea is that string theory seeks to explain the nature of reality but it might do so without putting forward any propositions that might ever be experimentally verified.
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Why We Can’t Have Nice Things #2: Ideological Biases
The title of this section is slightly misleading. This isn’t about the role of ideology itself but what I see as a product of ideology. When we think of science, historically and in the present, we think of men in lab coats, specifically white men. One way to rectify this image and reclaim an image of science as universal endeavour that should unite rather than exclude is by rectifying the histories we tell ourselves.
Paul Braterman, former Regents Professor at the University of North Texas, is another one of my favourite essayists at 3QuarksDaily and he does a spectacular job of mapping out various contributions of the Arabic world to science through the use of syllable al-.
Historically, the West has failed to give anything like due credit to the Arabic contribution to knowledge. A century ago, the justly renowned physicist, philosopher, and historian Pierre Duhem described the “wise men of Mohammedanism” as “destitute of all originality”. I myself, somewhat more recently, was taught at school that the Renaissance was brought about by Byzantine scholars who alone had been guarding the flame of knowledge kindled in classical times, and who, after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, were dispersed throughout Europe. This account is as unhistorical as it is patronising. We can trace the golden age of Arabic science to the eighth century translation project, centred on Baghdad, which made the thought and knowledge of the Greece (and Persia and India) available in Arabic. And we must in turn acknowledge, as among the events leading up to the Renaissance and what we call “the” Scientific Revolution, the translation project centred on Toledo, that four centuries later was to translate the work of the greatest of the Arabic scientists we have met into Latin.
But even when the golden age of Arabic science is mentioned, it is often only given credit for a holding role – translating ancient Greek texts into Arabic, waiting for the ‘dark ages’ to pass and then translating them back into Latin just in time for the Renaissance. This version of history leaves out the science that existed before and after these two massive translation projects. For a long time, historians claimed that sometime after the second translation project, the Arab world moved away from science, partly due to a renewed religious orthodoxy that, like the Church in Europe, saw some scientific ideas as heretical. While there was definitely a Golden Age, this neat collapse after passing the baton onto Europe probably didn’t happen.
One funny thing that did happen is that one of the critics of science at the time, al-Ghazali, wrote a book whose title is translated roughly as The Incoherence of Philosophers. I’d like to think he was predicting Foucault.
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Things We Don’t Understand #3: The Reality of Animal Minds
This deep dive into the current state of animal cognition research and the comeback of anthropomorphism contains another repercussion of consciousness-research: ethics. We stopped the use of apes and chimpanzees in scientific tests on the basis of their perceived cognitive capabilities – but what happens when those same things are shown in rats? (Never mind that the current focus on testing on rats is a bit like looking for your keys under the streetlights.)
Here’s Brandon Keim in the Chronicle of Higher Education on animal minds.
Are We Smart Enough is the latest in a profusion of books by scientists and popular-science writers: See also Carl Safina’s Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel, Nathan H. Lents’s Not So Different: Finding Human Nature in Animals, Jonathan Balcombe’s What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins, and Jennifer Ackerman’s The Genius of Birds, all published in the last year or so. New research describes qualities among nonhuman animals that were once considered exclusive to us: empathy, mental time-travel, language, self-awareness, and altruism. Journals overflow with studies of animal minds, frequently described in language also used to describe human minds, and feats of animal intelligence seem to go viral weekly: an octopus escaping its tank, crows gathering to mourn their dead, fish solving problems, monkeys grieving, and snakes socializing.
One of the conclusions of a new study conducted by researchers from Cardiff University, UK, and the University of Wollongong, Australia, is that there is “no evidence that exaggeration in press releases is associated with increased news uptake” – or that the prevalence of caveats is associated with a reduction. To arrive at this result, the researchers analysed 534 press releases issued by high-profile health and biomedical journals for 534 peer-reviewed papers and the 582 news articles that were subsequently published about them. In the paper’s conclusion, they write, rightly so, that the “findings should be encouraging for press officers and scientists who wish to minimise exaggeration and include caveats in their press releases.”
The Corporation of Chennai, for instance, is meant to enforce laws concerning burial, cremation or disposal of the dead by any other means. The Chennai City Municipal Corporation Act, 1919, has an entire section devoted to “Disposal of the Dead”. Section 321 (4) states that “No person shall bury, burn or otherwise dispose of any corpse except in a place which has been registered, licensed or provided as aforesaid.” Section 319 (1) of the Act sets out the process of licensing. It states that “no new place for the disposal of the dead whether public or private, shall be opened, formed, constructed, or used unless a license has been obtained from the council on application.” Sub-section (2) requires any application to be accompanied by a plan of the place, showing the locality, boundary and extent thereof, the name of the owner or person or community interested therein, the system of management and such…”. Section 321 (2) and (3) require the posting of a conspicuously visible sign near the entrance to the burial ground and publishing of a register of all approved burial places by the corporation.
When two blackholes collide to form a larger blackhole, there is a very large amount of energy released. In LIGO’s first detection of a merger, made on September 14, 2015, two blackholes weighing 29 and 36 solar masses merged to form a blackhole weighing 62 solar masses. The remaining three solar masses – equivalent to 178.7 billion trillion trillion trillion joules of energy – were expelled as gravitational waves. If GR has its way, with an infinitely thin event horizon, then the waves are immediately expelled into space. However, if quantum mechanics has its way, then some of the waves are first trapped inside the firewall of particles, where they bounce around like echoes depending on the angle at which they were ensnared, and escape in instalments. Corresponding to the delay in setting off into space, LIGO would have detected them similarly: not arriving all at once but with delays.
“Carbon dioxide signatures vary with topography, time-of-day, latitude and season,” he explained. “Temperature variations are very important – they cause the individual ro-vibrational spectral lines to vary in intensity.” Ro-vibrational stands for ‘rotational-vibrational’, a form of spectroscopy used to study the properties of gases. “The two instrument arms” – i.e. the methane and reference channels – “sample this variation in different ways, and accurate removal of the carbon dioxide signature from the difference signal is crucial to searching for methane, for example.” He added that the Fraunhofer lines, spectroscopic measurements used to infer the composition of a star’s atmosphere, “are also sampled differently by the two arms, further complicating the process”. As a result, “The net effect is that there is no way that one can [cancel] out those two signals in order to retrieve a methane signal”.
… we have a number of different agencies charged with preventing the introduction of invasive species and for management and control of invasive species. These include the Ministry of Environment Forests and Climate Change, the National Bureau of Fish Genetic Resources, the Plant Quarantine Organisation of India and various departments of the Ministry of Agriculture. This situation – “everybody’s responsibility, therefore nobody’s responsibility” – is far from ideal. We really need a single, comprehensive legal and policy framework on invasive species and a single nodal agency responsible for its coordination and implementation.
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And close. So, how did you like Thomas’s Infinite in All Directions? Just reply to this email to leave a comment. I hope to have more amazing guest-curated editions of this newsletter in the future. If you’d like to take a shot at it, please send a pitch to mukunth@cms.thewire.in.
Imagine you’re in a voting booth faced with a choice between two bad candidates. Surprisingly, science says this may actually be a good thing.
Imagine you’re in a voting booth faced with a choice between two bad candidates. Surprisingly, science says this may actually be a good thing.
This year, many voters will be unenthusiastic about their choices. Credit: Reuters/Charles Mostoller
How do voters select a candidate when no one they like is on the ballot?
Behavioural scientists have studied decision-making – including voting – for decades. However, researchers usually give respondents at least one appealing option to choose from.
This led us to wonder: What do voters do when they consider all of the options bad? Do they fall back on party affiliation or simply toss a coin? This question is especially appropriate in the current presidential election because the two front runners have the lowest favourability ratings ever.
When we did research to answer this question, we learned that in situations where all of the choices are bad, people tend to vote by rejecting the choices they didn’t like, rather than by affirmatively choosing the one they disliked least.
Imagine there are two undesirable candidates named Tilly and Ron. Given this “two bad choices” option, voters will be more likely to select Tilly because they reject Ron, rather than select Tilly proactively.
While the end result may be the same, the thought process that leads to this decision is quite different.
As behavioural scientists who study how people make decisions, we think this distinction could affect the upcoming presidential election. If people select between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump by using rejection rather than choice, then the information they use to make their decisions will be different.
In some ways, it may be better. Voters using rejection are more deliberate. They are less likely to be swayed by unimportant information about a candidate that they read or hear on radio, television or Facebook. They may pay less attention to rumours. In fact, conscientious voters may be well served to actively adopt a rejection strategy for their vote in order to make a choice more deliberately.
Choosing to reject
In a study we ran online in April, we showed people only Clinton and Trump as the two candidates for president. Those who found at least one of them attractive were more likely to select by choice, while those who disliked both were more likely to select by rejection.
Having determined that people use rejection strategies to make their voting decisions in bad-option situations, we next wanted to test how rejection strategies would change the information people focus on.
In nine separate studies we conducted, some of which will be published in an upcoming Journal of Consumer Research, we found that when people use rejection strategies, they also become more deliberate in their decision-making. In other words, they pay more attention to all information they have – both good and bad – and don’t get swayed as much by one piece of information that sticks out.
In our research, we saw more deliberation in rejection decisions and less of a tendency to be swayed by emotional, in-your-face information.
For example, one of these studies determined that people were less likely to vote based on party affiliation if they voted by rejection, rather than by choice. Respondents also took less time to make their decision in the choice condition versus the rejection condition.
Revisiting an old favourite
We reached these results by revisiting a classic study known as the “Asian disease problem.”
The Asian disease problem was first proposed by the behavioural economists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1981. It is well-studied because of the contradictory choices people make and is one of the many conundrums that Kahneman proposed which later won him the Nobel Prize.
In the standard formulation of the Asian disease problem, people choose between two programmes to combat an unusual Asian disease: programme A, which offers certainty; and programme B, which involves a risk.
The original research showed that people change their preferences between the two programmes depending on how the options are described.
People tend to select the more certain programme A if it is framed as a gain. Specifically, 72% of respondents preferred (A) “200 people are saved out of 600” while 28% picked the riskier (B) “1/3 probability that 600 people are saved and 2/3 probability that no one is saved.”
That may seem rational. However, change the wording and the results also change – even though the theoretical loss of life remains the same.
Programme A was preferred by only 22% of the recipients when researchers framed the choice like this: (A) “400 people will die out of 600” versus (B) “2/3 probability that 600 people will die and a 1/3 probability that no one will die.” With this wording, 78% choose the riskier option. This is because people tend to focus on emotionally salient information like “save” and “die.”
Emotional appeals less powerful
Our new research revisits this classic problem to study what would happen if the respondents were choosing which programme to reject instead of which one to choose. Would people be swayed less by the attention-grabbing words like “save” and “die”?
When we asked respondents which programme would you reject, respondents’ selections were affected less by the use of the emotional words. programme A was selected by 48% in the first pair and 43% selected it in the second. In other words, the decision between programme A and programme B was similar, whether “save” or “die” was used to describe the programmes.
The study results indicate that wild in-your-face claims made by candidates will get less weight if people use rejection strategies to vote.
Princeton psychology scholar Eldar Shafir has also found that rejection makes people focus on negative attributes. Perhaps the candidates’ campaign managers know this already and that is why the negativity in this election has been so high. But, the point to remember is that this cannot be a shallow negative attribute like sounding bossy or having a spray-tanning habit. People voting by rejection will be more deliberate – and will look carefully at what makes a candidate bad. Emotional claims will not work. Voters will think carefully about why they want to reject one of the candidates.
Aradhna Krishna, Dwight F Benton Professor of Marketing, University of Michigan and Tatiana Sokolova, Post-doctoral Researcher, University of Michigan
