In What
Americans Know about Politics[i],
Michael Carpini describes the availability heuristic: “what Americans know
most about politics is what is most readily available to them.”
Research has shown time and again that the majority
of voters in America know almost nothing about the American political system
and their representatives.[ii]
How then, do they decide who to vote for office? This is one of the central
questions in political psychology: how does an uninformed public make choices? The
question can be answered through the science of cognitive psychology.
The answer is through the use of heuristics, or
“shortcuts” of understanding. The average U.S. citizen does not spend all of
their time in determining who they are going to vote for in the next election. In
fact the majority spend little to no time in evaluating the actualities of
political candidates. The average American is busy and has no time for this,
nor do they believe their vote matters anyways. Instead, to choose candidates
they rely on the use of heuristics. This use may be accurate often but may also
lead to inaccurate assumptions. Politicians are aware of the public’s ignorance
and use of heuristics, they therefore employ cognitive psychological methods to
try and secure votes. Priming, framing, and activation are three tools
politicians use for elections to gain more votes, but they would not be
possible without the prior knowledge of certain heuristics.
Lau & Redlawsk attribute the use of five major
heuristics in determining who the public votes for.[iii]
What they determine as the most important heuristic is party affiliation. This
refers to which party a particular candidate belongs to, anywhere from
Libertarian to Communist, or the more common: Democrat and Republican. The
voter identifies which party they believe they agree with more and often choose
the candidate that too belongs to that party, this is the party heuristic. A
similar heuristic is the ideology heuristic. Voters rely on some of the choices representatives make
and group them with other decisions they think would be made because of the one
particular decision previously made. This heuristic is flawed as it could cause
an individual to vote for a candidate who say, may not stand for gun rights
even though they are pro-military.
Another heuristic used by voters is the endorsement
heuristic: when voters attribute the qualities of the endorser of a particular
candidate to the political candidate. Politicians have used this heuristic to
their advantage when they seek out a particular endorsement from a celebrity,
company, etc. For example, one from a popular former president, such as
President Obama did with Bill Clinton in 2008 and again in 2012. Voters know
Bill Clinton and many liked him, because they like Bill and Bill likes Barack,
they like Barack.
A common heuristic that is not referenced often is
the viability heuristic. Polls provide this through the use of a candidates
“standing” in the electoral race. The use of easy to read percentages, bar
graphs, and colors add to the cognitive saving heuristic of viability. This
heuristic is used often early in the political race when there are more
candidates. In this way voters are able to see who is winning and who is
losing, sometimes severely, and quickly make the decision, say, not to vote for
the guy with 3.2%.
The final heuristic Lau & Redlawsk argue is the
candidate appearance heuristic. This is of utmost importance in voter decision
because it is not restricted to anything but visual imagery. The voter can make
a decision based off a single picture, because of all the information it
provides, i.e. gender, race, age, and “likeableness,” which is reinforced by
societal stereotypes. Voters who know nothing about politics can use this to
make a decision, accurate or not. Some political scientists refer to this
heuristic as the “have-a-beer” heuristic: in which the candidate seems like
someone you’d want to have a beer with, which often locks in your vote. An
example of this was President Obama’s famous beer summit in 2009.
[i] Carpini, Michael. What Americans Know about Politics
and Why It Matters. New Haven: Yale UP, 1996. Print.
[ii]
Philip E. Converse (2006) The nature of belief systems in mass publics (1964),
Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society, 18:1-3, 1-74,
[iii] Advantages
and Disadvantages of Cognitive Heuristics in Political Decision Making
Richard R. Lau and David P. Redlawsk
American Journal of Political Science ,
Vol. 45, No. 4 (Oct., 2001), pp. 951-971
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