Voting Is Not a Rational Choice

The post Voting Is Not a Rational Choice appeared first on WhoWhatWhy.

We like to think we are rational beings. That our voting choices are based on a careful analysis of all those policy papers, websites and debates that the candidates participate in. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

Heaps of academic evidence now tell us that we vote, especially for president, based on emotion, on grievances, on tribalism, taste and on a set of biased moral judgments. None of it is based on reason or rationality.

In this week’s WhoWhatWhy conversation, Jeff Schechtman talks to Eyal Winter, who is a professor at the University of Leicester and the leader of the Center for the Study of Rationality of the Hebrew University. Winter says that while we crave ideology and we want our politicians to be ideologues, we simply see the ideology as a way for them to convey their personality to us.

He also talks about the “voting paradox.” The idea that the decision to make the effort to go out and vote is in itself an irrational decision. One that owes as much to entertainment and recreation as it does to politics. Given that, the result of the recent election should not surprise us.

Eyal Winter is the author of Feeling Smart: Why Our Emotions Are More Rational Than We Think. (Published by PublicAffairs, 2014)

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Full Text Transcript:  (Beta)

Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to Radio WhoWhatWhy, I’m Jeff Schechtman. A couple of weeks ago over 126 million people voted in America in spite of the false argument that one vote makes a difference. And yet, after a 16-month campaign, it was as if the election itself was a national catharsis. Like most big elections, it was a gut check, not a process as many philosophers would have us believe about rational choice and policy papers, but about emotion, tribalism, identity politics and, yes, even a form of entertainment and recreation. It’s all part of what some would call the voting paradox. And we’re gonna talk about that today with my guest Eyal Winter. He’s a professor of economics at the University of Leicester, as well as the Center for the Study of Rationality at Hebrew University. He’s the author of the previous book, Feeling Smart: Why Our Emotions Are More Rational Than We Think. He’s one of the world’s leaders in the study of decision-making and has served as chairman of the economics department at Hebrew University. He has lectured in over 130 universities in 26 countries. And it is my pleasure to welcome Eyal Winter to Radio WhoWhatWhy. Eyal, thanks much for joining us.

Eyal Winter: Thanks, thanks Jeff. It’s nice talking to you.

Jeff: When one of the things that we see over and over again, particularly on a national level, is that elections do matter with respect to policy. And yet, the bottom line seems to be that that’s not what drives people to participate in them. Talk a little about that first.

Eyal: No that’s not what drives people to participate in elections. Why people vote, the reason why they vote, is because they belong to a tribe, they’re driven by emotions. The Clinton era, where we had this phrase, “It’s the economy dummy,” it doesn’t apply anymore. People don’t vote in order to improve their own economic situation or because of some sort of interest, self-interest, reasoning. We vote because we’re driven by emotions, by resentment, by loyalty, by pride, by frustration, and to some extent, also fear. And this is what actually triggered the support to Trump in the US, and to some extent the support of Brexit.

So I think the main issue which we are sort of [inaudible] is this famous German word, “schadenfreude,”   the joy of having other people suffer. In the last several decades there’s an increased inequality between those who have and those who don’t have. And the way people react to it is by wanting this other group with more to suffer. Recently there has been a stunning number that I saw this morning in the Guardian, says the following, listen to this number, Brexit vote wipes $1.5 trillion off in UK household finances, only in 2016 alone. 

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