Anyone for a Warm Cup of Coffee?

Date01 April 2013
DOI10.1111/2041-9066.12007
Published date01 April 2013
AuthorEric Kaufmann
Subject MatterFeature
– determine whether bad news leads
to a stampede for the exit, or merely
a shrug. In addition, there has been
little attempt to move beyond a static
approach to consider how individual
emotions scale up within complex
societies and institutions.
Irrationality at the individual level
has been captured in some political
science experiments, but it’s also
vital to think about the cognitive
biases of entire groups or how bi-
ases f‌low along social networks. I
can think of nothing in politics akin
to the work in epidemiology by
Heidi Larson that tracks the spread
of anti-vaccination conspiracy theo-
ries. Just as soaring conf‌idence sent
house prices through the roof in the
2000s, it helped spread the rebellions
of the Arab Spring and post-Soviet
period. Collective fear is paralysing
the global economy and freezing the
normalisation of politics in Northern
Ireland or the attainment of peace in
Israel. Complex patterns of emotion-
al contagion are a powerful factor
in politics that has been essentially
ignored. A minority acknowledges
the role of culture, but here the focus
is on the spread of cognitive ideas
rather than emotions, neglecting
what Clifford Geertz described as the
way narratives instil ‘moods in the
minds of men’. Part of the challenge
for scholars in politics is to unshackle
their materialist and cognitive blin-
ders to embrace experiences cur-
rently treated as epiphenomenal.
Anyone for a
WarmCupofCoee?
How Politics can learn from
BehaviouralEconomics
In the past decade, a series of pop-
ular books have been published
on complexity and collective ir-
rationality. Complexity theory and
behavioural economics criticise the
individual-centred, rational actor
model of mainstream economics.
Since the study of politics is heavily
inf‌luenced by rational choice theory,
these new approaches should also
change the way we think about
politics. Meanwhile ‘Nudge’-style
policies, which depart from rational
choice assumptions, are increas-
ingly popular. What can the study of
politics, and academic departments,
learn from the wealth of knowledge
gleaned from decades of psychology
experiments?
Rethink Rational Choice
Theory
For decades, political science has
sought to adopt the theory and prac-
tice of neoclassical economics, but
parsimony has been purchased at the
expense of explaining how people
actually behave. What’s needed is
to inject reality back in by acknowl-
edging that what Keynes termed
‘animal spirits’ heavily shape our
preferences and decisions. At certain
times, people discount negative data
and accentuate the positive, while
at other times they do the reverse.
Waves of optimism and fear – about
a war, a leader, or the economy
Innovative psychology experiments and network models have radically undermined the once-popular ‘rational
actor’ model of human behaviour. Can this new research improve the study of politics and the policies of
academic departments, too? Eric Kaufmann examines the possibilities.
‘Big Names’
Fields tend to be dominated by a few
‘big names’ when their academic
merit may be only marginally higher
than others, if at all. An important
reason why some scholars gain
stature is because of the Founder
Effect. Like the QWERTY keyboard,
once something gets circulated, it
develops a network, which makes
it even more valuable. Pretty soon,
the suboptimal QWERTY design is
too dominant to replace. Likewise,
it may be the case that leading au-
thors in a f‌ield are no better than
some of their contemporaries. A few
lucky breaks or circumstances that
raise their prof‌ile are suff‌icient to
convince people that these are ‘go-
to’ authors. Once this information
spreads, it offers a shortcut to knowl-
edge, and its popularity becomes
self-fulf‌illing. In a well-publicised
web experiment with 14,000 re-
spondents, Duncan Watts and his
colleagues discovered that when
people were able to see the popu-
larity of songs, they herded toward
the popular songs and the pattern
of downloads took on a much more
skewed distribution than when no
download stats were provided. Most
journals advertise their most-down-
loaded papers, and this is bound to
increase their popularity still fur-
ther. We inhabit an age of citation
indexes, electronic bibliographies
and web-accessible reading lists.
We must
acknowledge
that what
Keynes termed
‘animal spirits’
heavily shape
our preferences
and decisions
20
Political Insight

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