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How your eyes can deceive you in a political campaign
One of the biggest myths in politics: “Everybody I know…”
When I was working in City Hall in a large-ish midwestern city, the Mayor used to say to me “that is never going to be heard on the sidewalk.”
He was referring to a political truism that has a number of sayings attached to it.
“Signs don’t vote.”
“The chattering classes…”
The point of all these sayings is that your eyes have a way of deceiving you. Economists Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler described these inclinations as “cognitive biases.” Contrary to how classical economics described people as “rational,” prospect theory of behavioral economics describes people as “irrational in certain predictable ways.”
In fact, the original cognitive bias identified by this theory is the representativeness heuristic bias. In effect, people take their limited experience and generalize it to the population as a whole, even though the people they interact with are not a representative sample.
Consider the lengths pollsters go through to ensure that their results are representative of the population as a whole. The start of a poll is simply calling people who are likely to vote and asking them their opinion.
