Deciphering the Political Brain
How many people, who drive high-performance cars, understand what goes on inside the engine? We leave the ‘complicated stuff' to the mechanics. But what if the mechanics are as clueless as the driver?
Anyone who is in politics has her own answer to some fundamental questions-
Lets try and get some honest answers, which may be applicable in some contexts. This is what makes electoral politics a complicated game. Most people will find comfort in using a standard template to run campaigns- playing safe, not experiment too much. The result is fairly obvious- the status quo continues.
The caveat here is that not all voters are the same and you cant hope to convert everyone. Different strategies need to be applied to different groups for us to open up their minds to considering other political options before them.
All electoral strategies have two pillars- reinforce retention, stretch the swing.
At Pollfirst, political cognition is one of the areas which have studied the academic literature closely and ran experiments to test these theories in various political contexts. Here are key learnings.
Neutral voter is notional concept: The neutral voter is a myth, does not exist in the world. Just as ‘Homo Economicus' or the rational human being who takes economic decisions based on rationality is a theoretical construct, ‘Homo Politicus' too exists only in text books. Voters come with their biases and emotional leanings, and a view of the world. While they do act in their best interests, each voter or voting group defines what its ‘best interests' are.
Political identity is ever changing: As humans, we have always found safety in numbers and are designed to come together against external threats. Our tribal pasts is deeply coded into our social behaviour and this is why we are always gravitating towards our group identity. Not everyone would want to be a part of this segmentation, but a large number of people would embrace this new political identity, leading to a re-alignment of political landscape. You could learn more about this in the Social Identity Theory, proposed by Henri Tajfel and John Turner in the 1970s
We are designed to re-enforce our belief systems: We all are a product of our socialization and the circumstances that we grow up in, inheriting the belief systems (and often the political affiliation) of our families. This is where ‘conformation bias' kicks in, as we pick up ‘evidence' that strengthens our belief systems and reject all information that counters our belief systems.
Polarization and Depolarization: Society and polity gets polarized when social identity starts to define political choices. The degree of polarization increases when both, the ingroup and the outgroup, polarize and make political choices on the basis of their social identities. Once a society reaches a state of ‘pernicious polarization,' it can be depolarized only if the ‘identity' is redefined. The ingroup solidarity has to be brought down below the critical mass, which would make it politically ineffective. This is one the key elements of modern political strategy.
Whie political parties, globally, are always appealing to ‘identities' and the war between the left and the right as they look to appeal to demographic segments and group interests.
There are more cognitive biases that shape our decision-making process. Psychologists believe that the human mind has to process a large amount of information on a daily basis and we all form mental shortcuts to get by in the world, without thinking too much about a person or a situation. Some of the biases are the following:
Zero-sum bias: A bias whereby a situation is incorrectly perceived to be like a zero-sum game in which one person gains at the expense of another. This also aids in polarisation as the in-group believes that they are losing out because of the ‘others.'
Ambiguity effect: The tendency to avoid options for which the probability of a favorable outcome is unknown. When political parties announce schemes in which the outcome is not clearly defined, it is likely to have lower than expected impact. In poll-sops it is not only important to announce how people would benefit, but also announce how the finances would be raised for. This adds credibility to poll announcements.
Loss aversion: The perceived disutility of giving up an object is greater than the utility associated with acquiring it. This plays out interestingly in politics as people have broadly come to terms with the status quo and are reluctant to change, unless there is some continuity in the change. The trick used by most incumbents is that the benefits provided by the government will be stopped if the new government is elected to office.
Disposition effect: The tendency to sell an asset that has accumulated in value and resist selling an asset that has declined in value. This is the other side of loss aversion as people undervalue the present and look for a better future. The ‘future' has to be defined with clarity and without any ambiguity.
Dread aversion: Just as losses yield double the emotional impact of gains, dread yields double the emotional impact of savouring. This bias plays on playing on the fear of loss & negative outcomes, and how it would impact your happiness.
Status quo bias: The tendency to like things to stay relatively the same. This is one of the key elements of political choice as we are willing to endure ‘the painful present' against a possibly worse tomorrow, so voters would continue to vote for the party in power, rather than a risk an uncertainty. This also reflects in the ‘System Justification Bias', which indicates that voters have a tendency to defend and bolster the status quo. Existing social, economic, and political arrangements tend to be preferred, and alternatives disparaged, sometimes even if does always align with ‘self-interest' of the voters.
Illusory truth effect: A tendency to believe that a statement is true if it is easier to process, or if it has been stated multiple times, regardless of its actual veracity. There is an element of herd behaviour in this as a large number of people would believe something if other people believe them too.
Rhyme as reason effect: Rhyming statements are perceived as more truthful. If you have ever wondered why poll slogans and advertising copies often rhyme. The main reason why this happens is old sayings and idioms often rhymed and since they are so deeply embedded in our consciousness, we would tend to believe the next rhyme we run into.
Subjective validation: Perception that something is true if a subject's belief demands it to be true. Also assigns perceived connections between coincidences. This is another form of confirmation bias where we pick up evidence to back and re-enforce our belief systems.
Diclinism: The predisposition to view the past favorably (rosy retrospection) and future negatively. This is the reason why political leaders are often leaning on the glories of the past as a key element in their political narrative. Donald Trumps MAGA movement is a classical case of using this bias to build a political base.
Dunning–Kruger effect: The tendency for unskilled individuals to overestimate their own ability and the tendency for experts to underestimate their own ability. This is the reason why competent people appear to be less confident in their abilities as they are more aware of the things that can go wrong.
Empathy gap: The tendency to underestimate the influence or strength of feelings, in either oneself or others. We tend to under-estimate the role of emotions in our decisions and believe that we are more rational than others.
Hindsight bias: Sometimes called the "I-knew-it-all-along" effect, the tendency to see past events as being predictable. at the time those events happened. This is used to generate anti-incumbency sentiment in case of failed schemes. Everyone knew that the scheme would be a failure, yet the government decided to go ahead, and look at what we have.
Moral credential effect: Occurs when someone who does something good gives themselves permission to be less good in the future. The United States elected Barack Obama for two terms, and then went on to elect Donald Trump. Without going into the merit of the choice, a significant part of the electorate changed their choice, from voting for Obama in 2012 to voting for Trump in 2016.
Omission bias: The tendency to judge harmful actions (commissions) as worse, or less moral, than equally harmful inactions (omissions). The inability to act is a lesser problem compared to implementing a bad decision.
Optimism bias: The tendency to be over-optimistic, underestimating greatly the probability of undesirable outcomes and overestimating favorable and pleasing outcomes. The power of optimism is used as a campaign tool globally as it remains a key element of campaign messaging design.
Outcome bias: The tendency to judge a decision by its eventual outcome instead of based on the quality of the decision at the time it was made. We will eventually be judged by the outcomes. If you have failed, you have failed.
Pessimism bias: The tendency for some people, especially those suffering from depression, to overestimate the likelihood of negative things happening to them. Human beings want to be optimistic about the future, but want to avoid the pain of seeing their dreams come crashing down. It is this balance of optimism and pessimism that acts as the equlibirium
Present bias: The tendency of people to give stronger weight to payoffs that are closer to the present time when considering trade-offs between two future moments.
Pro-innovation bias: The tendency to have an excessive optimism towards an invention or innovation's usefulness throughout society, while often failing to identify its limitations and weaknesses.
Women are wonderful effect: A tendency to associate more positive attributes with women than with men.
In addition to this, there are some key biases we have to consider when we design communications strategy for a campaign. We need to keep them in mind if we want our messaging to be sharp, effective and sticky.
Curse of knowledge is one of the main theories that govern how we communicate with the world and plays a decisive role in the political outcomes in our lives. It is defined as "When better-informed people find it extremely difficult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed people." Everyone, politicians included, is trying to communicate with others but most times, we fail to factor in the information level and the perspective of the target audience and assume them to have the background information needed to decipher, understand, process and act on what you have said. This has serious implications for a political leader because there is a disconnect between the leader as the listener begins to feel if the leader even understands them, leading to an erosion of control. The leader, hence, has to redesign the message to make it easy to understand, relevant and laced with emotional hooks to make them understand. This has to be done deliberately at first and then it becomes a part of your communication process. In short, don't expect people to make sense of economic data or any other data driven argument because people get into what Daniel Kahaneman described as System 2 thinking. You may not have heard of Kahaneman but you get it because I provided you with the context. The logical point has to be made after the audience is put in the right emotional context.
Salience bias basically means- Facts Fade Out, Emotions Stay. This is an Availability bias where people show the tendency to focus on items that are more prominent or emotionally striking and ignore those that are unremarkable, even though this difference is often irrelevant by objective standards. This is one the key factors that should drive your political content. The whole science of bounded rationality means that most people survive by feeling- hunger, fear, anger, love and other emotions listed earlier and the average person does not use statistical model for understanding economics. And there are always more than enough facts that we have to remember. Hence, we political content has to stand out by its emotional appeal or its design. If we can engage all the senses through political videos, you can huge impact on minds, provided you have enough reach.
Compassion fade is one of the key factors that you must remember when dealing with political content and tells us that People Matter More than Numbers. Figures like economic growth rate or the unemployment rate may be an indicator of the economic health of a country but it has no relevance on the lives of people because people respond to stories of people who are impact and if their lives have improved or suffered due to the current economic situation. Numbers can be used at the end of the story to reflect how big the problem is. It is important to de-intectualize a bit and speak in the language people understand stuff or else the effort would be wasted and someone more pragmatic would walk away with the vote.
Conjunction fallacy is another mental error which creeps in when not enough information is provided and people fill it in with the sense of context or with stereotypes to make sense of what is being said. Read the two sentences and see what you get out of it. Raju is in Jail. People are being forced to commit crimes because of rising unemployment. The two sentences are not connected but you get is that Raju is unemployed, which is why he committed a crime and hence he is in jail. Conjunction fallacy is used as a political tool when someone would mention Muslims and Pakistan in the same sentence and even if there is no direct mention, the impression it generates is that Muslims in India are generally pro-Pakistan or any other ideas that the right wing has been planting in people's health.
Framing effect is a commonly used spinning technique where the context in which the information is presented, defines how it is perceived by the receiving person and the stickiness of the context. While the effect is fairly simple to understand we have seen at work everyday in the political context, it only highlights the need to for facts to be presented in the right emotional context. This cognitive bias had a profound impact on human reasoning when it was first listed as a part of the prospect theory but has since become fairly well understood. You can look at this for a closer look.
If you have wondered why people continue to live in bad marriages or continue supporting teams who have no chance of winning, and hence offer limited emotional rewards, the answer lies in Irrational escalation or Escalation of commitment. This is a phenomenon where people justify increased investment in a decision, based on the cumulative prior investment, despite new evidence suggesting that the decision was probably wrong. Also known as the sunk cost fallacy which also has wider applications. Some people continue to feel so deeply connected to a cause that they want to be the last ones to leave the sinking ship and they would rather die than change their minds. In political terms, these could be defined as the ideologues who link their identity to the party or the support and the emotional cost of ‘abandoning the cause' is far higher than the cost of making a fresh start. Such people are the bedrock of support for any ideology all they are looking for are recognition and don't expect much. They take commitment to the level of irrationality and keep making emotional commitments, hoping for a massive emotional pay off at some point in history. Recognise them and use could use them as role models for other members of the ingroup for greater group cohesion.
Selection bias is simply noticing more often that your sub-conscious mind is looking for. It is defined as "The tendency to notice something more when something causes us to be more aware of it, such as when we buy a car, we tend to notice similar cars more often than we did before. They are not suddenly more common – we just are noticing them more. Also called the Observational Selection Bias." Every day of our lives, we there is tonnes of information which is competing for our attention. To prevent the brain from getting into a cognitive overload, our subconscious mind is shutting out useless information and filtering through stuff that matters. If we like something, our brain notices it more often and there is a greater reinforcement. Hence, creativity matters more than we think as we need to slip through these neural filters to make the point.
Selective perception is another confirmation bias in which people show the tendency for expectations to affect our perception of people and outcomes, and can be considered an extension of the Placebo effect. Political campaigns set high expectations and every five years the country feels a burst of hope and a new beginning. The emotional impact of the election campaign continues to linger and hope dies down over a period of time. Expectation management is a key part of politics and political parties, liberals more than the right wing, need to keep focusing on keeping the same level of communication going after the elections are over.
Bandwagon effect is a Conformity bias and is one of the most frequently used terms in politics though many people don't really understand what it means and how it is to be applied. This is the reason why electoral victories of parties get bigger when they have achieved complete control over the narrative. This also explains why Congress won relatively small victories in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan in 2018, when there was clear anti-incumbency against the state governments.
It is defined as "The tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink and herd behavior." The bandwagon effect is created because people lack the ability to take critical decisions on their own and hence need external validation. This creates a situation that when someone takes the lead and appeals to our emotional interests (not always rational or economic), we tend to agree with them. We fall for their persuasion and join them in ‘their cause.'
The more people join the ‘band-wagon,' the more seductive it becomes as people have limited confidence in their abilities but believe in the wisdom of the crowds. So if you are a religious or a political leader, you know that getting the first batch of followers is the difficult part, once you get past that, the bandwagon effect comes into play and gathers steam as it gets down the hill. The rise of the BJP from 1984 is a good example, not because they are on a winning spree now but because it tells us what long-term planning does.
Most of the present ideas were generated during this phase when they realised that they need to move further to the right and by their attack against Rajiv Gandhi was based on this, like they had done before the emergency and like they did in 2014. There were enough people who remained committed to the core belief system but the circumstances of the time reduced them to being a cult group,
Anchoring or focalism is "The tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor", on one trait or piece of information when making decisions (usually the first piece of information acquired on that subject)." While psychologists see this more as a ‘first impressions last' kind of effect, it plays out differently in politics and is used as both a diversionary and manipulative technique. The side with higher reach and share of voice (not always the ruling party) uses their greater reach to define the context on the issue and the rest of the debate is then focused or anchored around the pointers, not looking at the bigger issue at hand. So if you are caught in a debate where you don't have much to say to defend your position, say something outrageous which becomes the focal issue and we start debating that. Also known as agenda setting, the Narendra Modi sets the agenda with some random stuff and the entire media and all Opposition parties starts talking about the issue, the public discourse is now anchored on another issue and the previous issue is forgotten, more like a jumping monkey which is now on a different roof.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, focus on and remember information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions and this is one of the key reasons why political speeches and content has to be sharp and unambiguous, not open to any kind of misinterpretation as it could be used against you. As we wade through political content, we pick up and retain stuff which confirm to our existing belief system, finding more and more reasons to support the political party we stand with.
Conservatism bias (belief revision) and Semmelweis reflex are Anchoring biases which notes that people show a the tendency to revise one's belief insufficiently when presented with new evidence. This is line with John Zaller's RAS model and also one of the main reasons why we live in the era of fake news and post-truths and is one of key factors you have to deal with the political space. The reason, it is said, is while the facts are incidental, people don't want to let go of the emotional response non-facts had generated and it takes a wise person to review their emotional associations in light of the new facts. Backfire effect goes a step further in which the reaction to disconfirming evidence ends up in strengthening one's previous beliefs. The existence of this bias as a widespread phenomenon has been disputed in empirical studies but this is true in the political context because once people have taken sides, any attack on their belief systems is considered to be enemy propaganda and has to be resisted. This is defence for your in-group to against new information that reaches them, and they remain loyal to you. Thius also linked to the Continued influence effect in which people continue to believe previously learned misinformation even after it has been corrected. This is the reason why people continue to target the Congress for black money and corruption allegations as the BJP government has not been able to prove anything for the last six and half years.
Normalcy bias is a key planning error which is not limited to politics and is one of the human conditions, which results in a lot of pain due to change and is a big life lesson. It is defined as the "The refusal to plan for, or react to, a disaster which has never happened before." This could not be truer as the world copes with Covid 19. The problem is that we expect the future to be a continuation of the present and the past and the more things change, the more they remain the same. Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about the concept of the Turkey Fallacy in which he says that the turkey trusts the hands feeds it everyday, till the day it is pulled out and taken out for thanksgiving dinner. The challenge is to look at the future filled with new opportunities and threats, delinked from the past. Change is the only constant in life.
In strategic studies, there is a saying belief that ‘all plans fall apart when you make first contact with the enemy but few commanders show the flexibility to adapt to changing ground situation. The Plan continuation bias has been defined as the "Failure to recognize that the original plan of action is no longer appropriate for a changing situation or for a situation that is different than anticipated.
At Pollfirst, we factor in all these biases when we draw out your political and campaign strategy. The net output, however, has to be simple and seamless. The customer would never know what is under hood of the car.
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