{"id":264504,"date":"2016-11-02T10:30:52","date_gmt":"2016-11-02T14:30:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/policyoptions.irpp.org\/issues\/do-people-vote-with-their-hearts-or-their-minds\/"},"modified":"2025-10-07T21:20:25","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T01:20:25","slug":"do-people-vote-with-their-hearts-or-their-minds","status":"publish","type":"issues","link":"https:\/\/policyoptions.irpp.org\/fr\/2016\/11\/do-people-vote-with-their-hearts-or-their-minds\/","title":{"rendered":"Do people vote with their hearts or their minds?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Take a look at mainstream or social media coverage of the US presidential election, and you\u2019ll find a lot of head scratching about how Donald Trump has managed to garner so much support (some of it has come from yours truly<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Many of the arguments boil down to this: Clinton is clearly better qualified than Trump, and her policy platforms are so objectively superior that it hardly makes sense that the two candidates are so close in the polls. But based on what we know about human psychology, it makes more sense than many of us may think. Or hope.<\/p>\n

A few years ago, University of Chicago psychologist\u00a0Christopher Hsee\u00a0conducted a neat\u00a0experiment using hypothetical ice cream<\/a>. He asked one group of people to imagine an under filled cup of their favourite ice cream \u2014 8 oz of ice cream in a 10 oz cup \u2014 and asked them to offer him fair price to purchase it. The average willingness to pay was $1.66. To a different group of people, he offered a similar deal, but with a twist. This time, he offered them less ice cream \u2014 7 oz, to be exact \u2014 but in this case, the ice cream was in a 5 oz cup, which runneth over. Not surprisingly, the overfilled cup garnered a higher price: $2.26. When he presented the same ice cream options side by side to a third group of people, the average willingness to pay was reversed. People were now willing to pay more \u2013 as one might hope! \u2013 for the larger amount of ice cream, regardless of the cup\u2019s size, than they were for the smaller amount.<\/p>\n

Hsee explained the results this way: The absolute amount of ice cream, 7 oz or 8 oz, in a cup is difficult to instinctively evaluate for all but the most seasoned ice cream experts. But the appearance of \u201cfullness\u201d is easy to evaluate instinctively for pretty much anybody; we all know when we\u2019re getting a good deal or when we\u2019re being ripped off. In the absence of expertise in a situation like this, the mind uses the information it can to make a judgment, using the easy-to-evaluate factor in this case.<\/p>\n

The psychologist\u00a0Paul Slovic\u00a0took these results<\/a> a step further, suggesting that what makes a factor easy or difficult to evaluate has to do with the emotional connection we can make with it. Easy-to-evaluate factors \u2014 such as the fullness of a cup of ice cream \u2014 are the ones that map neatly into what Slovic\u00a0and others<\/a>\u00a0call system 1 in the brain. In the most basic terms, system 1 encodes information by way of an instinctive emotional response, feelings such as \u201cdread\u2019\u2019 and \u2018\u2018optimism,\u201d or qualities such as \u2018\u2018goodness\u2019\u2019 and \u2018\u2018badness.\u2019\u2019 It\u2019s easy to feel, on an emotional level, that an overfilled ice cream is good. It\u2019s what many of us in my field refer to as deciding with our hearts.<\/p>\n

Factors such as the absolute amount of ice cream, on the other hand, require our brains to use system 2, which relies on technical or scientific expertise and number-crunching. In other words, system 2 requires us to make decisions with our minds. In the absence of this expertise (crunching numbers is hard work), our \u201chearts\u201d fill the void.<\/p>\n

Bringing the two cups of ice cream together in a side-by-side comparison provides much-needed perspective. Consumers can now see that 8 oz is better than 7 oz, regardless of the cup size. Likewise, people can recode certain emotional factors (such as cup size) as being less important to them overall when compared with other, more relevant ones (such as the absolute amount of ice cream). In this sense, a side-by-side comparison is a simple but effective decision-support tool, because it provides much-needed context and helps people to set priorities among the variables that are important to them and those that are less so.<\/p>\n

Elections, and the campaigns leading up to them, are all about side-by-side comparisons, where the conflict between heart and mind should be diminished.<\/p>\n

Candidates and policy options square off against one another, and the airwaves are crammed with information about the candidates\u2019 strengths and shortcomings.\u00a0At their core, elections are all about setting priorities among long lists of concerns, and about making decisions that reflect our judgments about the issues that warrant the most attention. So, all of these comparisons should help, right?<\/p>\n

Not so fast.<\/p>\n

In Hsee\u2019s ice cream study, the flavour of the ice cream itself was not a factor in the experiment; it was always assumed to be the respondents\u2019 preferred flavour. Thus, the only variables of interest were the relative fullness of the cup and the absolute amount of ice cream. But, in elections, if fullness and\u00a0amount<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>are the candidate\u2019s stances on the issues, then the candidates themselves represent different flavours of ice cream.<\/p>\n

Does a side-by-side comparison help in a situation like this? In an attempt to find an answer,\u00a0Robyn Wilson, a professor at the Ohio State University, and I conducted a study in which we compared two problems that people face in many small towns across the Midwest:\u00a0property crime and deer overpopulation<\/a>. Both represent risks to human health and property. We knew from a prior study that crime would lead to a strong emotional reaction, while deer overpopulation would, relatively speaking, pale in comparison. So, when we presented information to people about the risks posed to people and property, we made sure that the risks from deer overpopulation were higher than those from property crime.<\/p>\n

What did we find? When these two problems were compared side by side, people routinely chose to devote management attention and resources to property, even though the damages from deer overpopulation were always more severe. To test our ideas further, we repeated the experiment several times, each time making the damages from deer overpopulation even bigger, while holding those from property crime constant. No matter how big the difference in damages, we could not get people to take action on deer overpopulation. It was as though people simply couldn\u2019t get past the emotional tug of the problem \u2014 crime<\/em> \u2014 no matter what empirical data we presented about it.<\/p>\n

The emotional signals are so powerful that we neglect to consider the objective information that should help us distinguish the pros and cons of the options.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bringing this back to elections, results like ours \u2014 especially when they are combined with other research on\u00a0the importance of the cultural underpinnings of preference<\/a> \u2014 strongly suggest that the usual evaluative benefits of a side-by-side comparison virtually disappear when the options themselves invoke strong emotions. Wilson and I called this \u201cvalue neglect.\u201d The emotional signals sent out by the alternatives themselves are so powerful that we\u00a0neglect<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>to consider the objective information that should help us to distinguish the pros and cons of the options in the first place.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t good news from the standpoint of voters who claim they are voting for one candidate over another because of where each candidate stands on the issues. In reality, these voters are probably making their selection based in large part on the emotional connections they forge with the candidates themselves.<\/p>\n

In other words, voters prefer Donald Trump \u2014 or Hillary Clinton, for that matter \u2014 because of the emotional connection they (or the parties they represent) have forged with the electorate. So, in a democracy where people are almost evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, it\u2019s hardly surprising that people don\u2019t take the time to look more closely at the issues. Put another way, when it comes to political ice cream flavours, people are either partial to Donald or Hillary; how much or \u2014 in Trump\u2019s case \u2014 how little they actually receive in their proverbial cup or cone barely registers. The best evidence for this is that, in spite of the key differences between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump (not to mention between countless other candidates and initiatives that can be found further down the ballot), they find themselves uncomfortably close to one another in terms of the expected popular vote, where Clinton right now leads Trump by a flimsy\u00a05-point margin<\/a>.<\/p>\n

All of this raises the question: Is there anything we can do if we want to\u00a0try to<\/em>\u00a0make evidence-based decisions about candidates and ballot initiatives?\u00a0The answer is,\u00a0sort of<\/em>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Ongoing research in my lab suggests that considering the pros and cons of anonymized<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>options \u2014 that is, evaluations of options where you only see the details that differentiate them, and not the labels (like \u201cTrump\u201d or Clinton\u201d) that define them \u2014 can lead people to establish preferences and ranked preference orders that are better calibrated to their own values and concerns.<\/p>\n

Likewise, decision-support processes that start by asking people to\u00a0set priorities\u00a0before\u00a0<\/em>they evaluate the alternatives\u00a0<\/a>similarly help, initially, to overcome the biases associated with the emotional appeal of identifiable options.\u00a0In the domain of elections, websites such as Vote Compass<\/a> and I Side With<\/a> are designed to do exactly this.<\/p>\n

Still, tools and approaches like these are far from perfect because, in the end, voters have to look at the candidates and their emotions will inevitably weigh in during decision-making. Indeed, in\u00a0a recent study of decision support tools<\/a>\u00a0that pointed to certain alternatives based on an individual\u2019s stated priorities, a majority of users indicated they would rather stick with their own unaided preferences.<\/p>\n

So, are a majority of voters on November 8 likely to choose the candidates and ballot initiatives that align most neatly with their values, concerns and priorities? The answer, sadly, is probably not.<\/p>\n

Photo:\u00a0M. Unal Ozmen \/ Shutterstock.com<\/p>\n

This article is part of The US Presidential Election<\/a> special feature.<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Do you have something to say about the article you just read? Be part of the\u00a0<\/em>Policy Options\u00a0discussion, and send in your own submission.\u00a0Here is a\u00a0<\/em>link<\/em><\/a>\u00a0on how to do it. <\/em>|\u00a0Souhaitez-vous r\u00e9agir \u00e0 cet article ? <\/em>Joignez-vous aux d\u00e9bats d\u2019<\/em>Options politiques\u00a0et soumettez-nous votre texte en suivant ces\u00a0<\/em>directives<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Take a look at mainstream or social media coverage of the US presidential election, and you\u2019ll find a lot of head scratching about how Donald Trump has managed to garner so much support (some of it has come from yours truly). 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