Jumping in Front of Moving Trucks
In a recent Salon article, a Columbia University sociology professor, Duncan Watts, exposes the Democratic primaries for the experiment in psychology that they are. Specifically, they’re a model of a 1950s experiment that proved that many people will agree with their peers due to social pressure, even if those peers are totally out to lunch. (How else to explain why, as soon as a few people approach the departure gate at the airport, everyone else madly shuffles over too — we must be boarding soon! HURRY!)
John Kerry will win the leadership because Iowans and New Hampshirites gave him the most support. The rest of the country is merely falling in line — the “cascade effect.” If everyone else thinks John Kerry can beat Bush, then he must be the guy, right?
It’s hard to fault such reasoning if your goal is only to find a Bush-beater. You may like John Edwards or Howard Dean, but you know that not everyone agrees with you. This is no time for independent thought, you think. You must vote for the guy that will get the votes!
Perhaps some of this seems obvious. Especially since journalists have wasted little paper in analyzing just why Kerry is winning, and What Went Wrong with Howard Dean’s campaign. In this matter, Mr. Watts’s article is more astute. He demonstrates that such analysis is an instance of “hindsight bias”, another researched phenomenon, in which given the facts later, one claims to have known all along. They’re saying, you all could have seen the end of Dean draw nigh if you’d only paid attention to the clues. When in fact, you could easily flip those clues around to explain why Dean would have won. Was he too angry or was he passionate? Was he disorganized or was he “grassroots”? And Dean could have won if he had happened to take New Hampshire. A very small state with a few measly voters.
“Because the cascade is effectively driven by a small minority of voters,” writes Watts, “the result is more or less arbitrary—Dean really could be winning just as easily as Kerry.” I agree. It wouldn’t have taken much for Kerry, who initially looked hopeless, to have stayed that way. “But once we know the answer, hindsight bias kicks in and makes the arbitrariness of the cascade (seem to) go away.”
Soon the John Kerry experiment will begin, thanks mostly to chance. Personally, I think he’s an uncharismatic dweeb, and I don’t like his chances against Bush. But that’s just my lone opinion, twisting in the wind of a million other voices.
Previously: ¡Hola amigos!
Subsequently: That Old LED Magic
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