Study: Voters' ill-informed decision making




The study's three findings:

Voters focus on recent rather than cumulative incumbent performance. Polls show that most voters wait until just before an election to pay attention to elected officials' activity. Huber's study found that this resulted in voters giving disproportionate weight to incumbents' most recent actions.

Voters are influenced by events unrelated to incumbent performance. Previous studies have found that hurricanes, shark attacks, and even sporting event outcome can sway a voter. Droughts, for example, cut into an incumbent president's vote tally in the effected state. Huber's study found that "voters' retrospective abilities are sufﬁciently limited ... that they punish incumbents for uncontrollable events even under conditions where attribution of responsibility is clear."

Voters are distracted from incumbents' actual performance by rhetoric and marketing. It may surprise few that words can speak louder than actions. Huber's study specifically showed two ways rhetoric can make someone interpret facts differently.

(Related story: Ideology, not facts, often drives political beliefs)

Huber and his colleagues - Seth Hill of UC San Diego and Gabriel Lenz of UC Berkeley - tested these three behavioral tendencies "in a decision-making context that mimics real-world elections but takes the simpliﬁed form of an incentivized experimental game, allowing us to rule out competing explanations for these apparent biases."

The game was administered online to 4,000 participants, who were told they would be assigned one of several computerized "allocators." They were also told that these allocators would give them between 950 and 1,400 tokens in each of 32 rounds. The goal for the participant was to accumulate as many tokens as possible.

The allocator took the role of an incumbent politician (but with less personality than John Kerry) in determining voter behavior.

After 16 rounds, participants would decide whether to keep their original allocator or request a new one, based on whether they thought they would get more tokens from a new allocator. The average allocation per round for all participants was 1,200 tokens, so the best objective choice for the participant would be to keep their allocator if they were receiving an average of more than 1,200 tokens per round and to get a new one if they were receiving less than 1,200.

Participants were not explicitly told that 1,200 was the average, but they could get a good idea based on the range they were told was possible.

The first test examined whether voters focus on recent rather than cumulative incumbent performance. Some game participants were told before the first round that they would have a chance to pick a new allocator after 16 rounds. Others were not told they could replace their allocator until they'd completed 12 rounds.

Those not told until after 12 rounds paid an inordinate amount of attention to the amount of tokens given in the later rounds, giving later tokens more value in the decision-making process. How much more? A single token in the later rounds was worth 1.8 tokens in the earlier rounds.

The second test looked at whether voters are influenced by events unrelated to incumbent performance, such as droughts. To test this, researchers gave some participants "lottery" bonuses in later rounds.

Participants were told that these lottery winnings had nothing to do with the amount of tokens given by their allocators. Yet participants "winning" the lottery were more likely to keep their original allocator. Although lottery tokens had no relation to the generosity of a given allocator, participants on the average counted a lottery token as being worth 40 percent of a regularly allocated token when deciding whether to keep their incumbent allocator.

The third test measured whether voters are distracted from incumbent performance by rhetoric and marketing. After the 16th round - before deciding whether to keep their incumbent allocator - some participants were asked how satisfied they were with their allocator (a "hedonic prime"). Others were asked instead what they thought their average allocation was (an "informational prime"). And others were not asked anything.

Voters given the hedonic prime were the most likely to retain their incumbent allocator, even when the allocator performed below average. Voters given the informational prime were the least likely to retain below-average allocators.

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