Book Review: The Rationalizing Voter v. 1

Context: This book review is non-technical. It is intended to convey the gist of one hypothesis of how people think and form opinions when responding to information about politics. The 2013 book, The Rationalizing Voter is an academic book. It is laden with technical terminology and fairly complex concepts. This review simplifies the content for a lay audience. A second, more technical review is here for people interested in some of the details of the hypothesis, called the John Q Public model of political thinking.

“We are witnessing a revolution in thinking about thinking. Three decades of research in the cognitive sciences, backed by hundreds of well-crafted behavioral studies in social psychology and new evidence from the neurosciences, posit affect-driven dual process models of thinking and reasoning that directly challenge the way we political scientists interpret and measure the content, structure, and relationships among political beliefs and attitudes. Central to such models is the distinction between conscious and unconscious thinking, with hundreds of experiments documenting pervasive effects of unconscious thoughts and feelings on judgment, preferences, attitude change, and decision-making.”

Political scientists Milton Lodge and Charles Taber commenting on their book, The Rationalizing Voter

“The central question in the study of political psychology and public opinion is whether citizens can form and update sensible beliefs and attitudes about politics. Though previous research was skeptical about the capacities of the mass public, many studies in the 1980s and early 1990s emphasized the potential merits of simple heuristics in helping citizens to make reasonable choices. In subsequent years, however, motivated reasoning has been impossible to avoid for anyone who follows either contemporary politics or the latest developments in psychology and political science. . . . . it is increasingly difficult for observers to defend micro-level attitude formation and information processing as rational or even consistently reasonable. Evidence continues to mount that people are often biased toward their prior beliefs and prone to reject counter-attitudinal information in the domains of both opinions and politically controversial facts.”

Political scientist Brendan Nyhan commenting on The Rationalizing Voter

The 2013 book, The Rationalizing Voter, by Milton Lodge and Charles Taber presents a hypothesis to explain how people respond to political events and information that trigger responses to how we perceive, think and form beliefs about events and information we encounter. The authors based their hypothesis on decades of psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience research by themselves and others. As recently discussed, the timeline for thinking and forming initial positive or negative reactions to politics-related content occurs in about one to two seconds, with unconscious thinking preceding and shaping conscious awareness and thinking.

Lodge and Taber refer to their hypothesis as the John Q Public (JQP) model of political thinking. JQP proposes that once a person experiences an event such as a political speech, sees politically evocative images or otherwise encounters political information, their mind instantly starts a two-step process to evaluate the content. The first step is automatic, uncontrollable unconscious processing, which occurs in less than one second. In this mode of thinking, unconscious feelings precede and shape conscious thinking before we are aware that this has happened.

The available evidence reveals this first step is heavily biased if the information is contrary to personal beliefs, morals and social identity. In those situations, unconscious processing distorts information to make it more acceptable to the person’s pre-existing beliefs, morals and identity. Information that confirms pre-existing beliefs, morals and identity, even if it is false, tends to be uncritically accepted as true.

The second step in the process is the much slower, much lower bandwidth conscious processing of what the unconscious mind chooses to put into our consciousness. Unconscious thinking is very different from conscious thinking. Unconsciousness is believed to involve parallel processing of information or data in a high bandwidth process that operates on thousands or millions of available memories, and moral and other beliefs. By contrast, conscious thinking works by a much slower, very low bandwidth serial processing that works with a maximum of five to nine memories at any given time. The memories that our heavily biased unconscious minds select to put into consciousness shape how we perceive and think about political content.

The JQP hypothesis posits that once unconsciousness moves memories into consciousness, the conscious mind operates mostly to rationalize and defend what unconsciousness has put there. Contrary to how many or most people see themselves, conscious reason operates in politics mostly to rationalize and defend our unconscious mindset, often even when that mindset is clearly and objectively wrong. In many situations neither contrary facts or solid logic will change what the unconscious mind wants to believe.

All of this reflects how evolution shaped the human mind. This is not intended as a criticism of the human condition or human intelligence. Our evolutionary intellectual heritage suggests that humans have significant limits in how intelligent members of the species can be. When it comes to politics, humans are generally incapable to responding rationally to uncomfortable facts and logic. Politics is usually too complex and opaque to be rational about. Instead of adjusting beliefs and behaviors to rationally respond to reality, we tend to rationalize.

If the JQP hypothesis of political information processing is basically true, then it shows why lying in politics is so effective with so many people. Partisans on one side or the other can simply lie and if the lie accords with a person’s pre-existing mindset, the lie is often accepted as true. Taber and Lodge also point to the fact that simply repeating a lie over time tends to make it appear to be truthful. That is a powerful tool. Political partisans and special interests have been using the lie for millennia to win hearts and minds. Unprincipled (immoral) partisans will continue to lie as long as lying is effective.

Lodge and Taber understand the arguably discouraging nature of what their model proposes. Nonetheless, existing data supports their hypothesis to a reasonable degree. There are unanswered questions, but at least JQP is a hypothesis that is now being tested for how well it describes humans thinking about politics. If the model is ultimately found to be basically true, Lodge and Taber opine that “maybe JQP is as rational as we homo sapiens can be.”

Long-terms prospects for politics: A defense against the dark arts hypothesis: That is not to say that nothing can be done to at least somewhat rationalize politics relative to what it is now. Partial rationalization will require large scale social engineering to teach self-awareness about how the human mind works and how and why it is so easily deceived and misled by intelligent manipulation. Once widespread social awareness has been built, that will become a powerful source of pressure to elevate the role of objective fact and solid reason or logic in thinking about politics. Social and self-awareness amounts to what is, in essence, a defense against the dark arts of lies, deceit, emotional manipulation, unwarranted opacity and other forms of immoral speech or ‘dark free speech’.

For better or worse, building social awareness will probably require at least two generations of mandatory public education. That education must include teaching defense against the dark arts of lies, deceit and emotional manipulation and the effort it takes to become a less-deceived, responsible citizen and voter. Until then, we will remain rationalizing voters. Given political dangers that are growing daily, the human race remains rationalizing at its own long-term peril.

B&B orig: 10/30/18