"Good Options Can Mask Bad Choices"

Source: Shankar Vedantam, The Washington Post, January 14, 2008.

This is an interesting short article on a bias in decision making. Vedantam writes:

Democrats argue about the relative merits of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, but opinion polls suggest that most Democrats think they are choosing among excellent options. Should any of these candidates win in November, your average Democrat will be delighted.

The Republicans present a very different field. John McCain and Rudy Giuliani are viewed with suspicion by social conservatives and Republicans most worried about illegal immigration. Mike Huckabee is viewed with suspicion by the party establishment and by fiscal conservatives. Mitt Romney is viewed with suspicion by, well, depending on which version of Romney you mean, nearly everyone.

Psychological experiments show that people behave and think differently when they are confronted with multiple strong alternatives, compared with when they face a number of poor choices......

(W)hat the research does reveal, paradoxically, is that Democrats might be more willing to accept a poor candidate because they like all their choices. When people are predisposed to feel good about their decisions, the internal warning mechanism that tells them they are making a mistake may not go off. By contrast, Republicans are not predisposed to be satisfied with whomever they choose.

Vedantam suggests that the Republicans choosing carefully from a weak field may produce a better candidate that the Democrats choosing less carefully from a strong field because of this bias in human decision making.

Comment: Perhaps we should consider the election in a different way. After the election, we will have a new president, but also a recession and an economy faced by emergent challenges not only from newly industrializing nations but to our technological leadership. We will still have a war in Iraq and a war in Afghanistan. We will have a weak education system, and a health system that costs an arm and a leg and does not offer adequate protection to our poor. We will face a world that increasingly distrusts our intentions and our wisdom. Moreover, we will still live in a world where not only is global warming threatening our grandchildren, but in which environmental degradation is taking place in many countries, and is increasing due to both population growth and the growing per-capita environmental footprint of those people. And we will face all of that with a budget that has been driven into huge deficits, an aging population many of whom will retire in the not too distant future.

I suggest we choose our new president very carefully, because he or she will not make much difference to a very grave situation unless he or she is very competent indeed, and brings with him or her a very strong team to implement a very good program! JAD