Terms explanation: Heuristics

 There is an interesting and still unsolved debate in political science as to whether voters need political information to decide who they are going to vote for. More specifically, if voters need some sort of information, to what extent is it sufficient for them to make a valid decision. Downs (1957), in his famous argument about median voters, states an assumption that voters have sufficient information of each candidate’s policy position in each issue, and what policy they could anticipate if this candidate gets elected. However, these “pure” rational voters seem unrealistic in reality; therefore, Simson (1985) argues that we should think of voters as boundedly rational, who can be only motivated to seek a limited amount of political information. People’s cognitive ability is also limited in the amount of information they are able to process. 

However, Simson (1985) argues that voters are still rational in decision making, that voters tend to make the voting decision based on the relatively limited information they have or remember. Here, we are talking about a memory-based decision that basically voters remember as much as they can about each candidate and their policy positions and then make a comparison in the voting booth. However, human beings are lazy and might not be incentivized to conduct this time-consuming act, thereby, political psychologists then propose another concept, heuristics, which means that we use short-cuts to make decisions as if we have all the information. For instance, I do not want to actually figure out the policy position that president Trump has, but judging by the heuristics, Republican party, I believe that his policy position is more leaning toward conservative. To be more specific, without actually watching the political debate, which might take me more than 3 hours while I could use that time to see a movie, I assume that Donald Trump is a conservative candidate since he is from the Republican party. Then, in the voting booth, the decision-making becomes simple, I just need to decide if I like the Republicans more or the Democrats more, even without knowing the exact policy position and pledges that Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton made during the electoral campaign. This sounds super nice, right? What is the point of reading a newspaper or watching political debates if I could know which candidate is closer to my policy position by their partisanship? However, the risk of using heuristics is that we are uncertain whether it could help us to make the right decision if we have sufficient information. There here are multiple heuristics we could choose to make the decision. We could rely on “which talk shows the candidate was on” as a way to identify their policy decisions. However, it might be wrong. Put differently, we might choose the wrong heuristic for this decision.

To use another more illustrating example, using a heuristic to help to make decisions faster does not mean we could make the right decision as if we have the full information. Think about cheating on the final exam. Just to be clear, I am not encouraging cheating. Say you did not review the study guides that I provided and did not come to class as frequently as your fellow classmates, you might have a higher chance to fail this class since you might not know what is the correct answer of the exam. To make a decision—whether to put A, B, C, or D for this question of your exam sheet— which you do not have a lot of information (since you did not put the effort in it), you are incentivized to rely on “heuristics”—what is the guy’s answer sit next to me—to answer the exam questions. However, since you have not been in the class for a month, you do not know which classmate is more likely to have the right answer: the one sits on your left or your right? You could copy a wrong answer sheet while you are bearing the risk of being caught in cheating.

Therefore, information intake is always important. Even though we might not need to be as informed as Downs (1957) assumes, the more informed we are, the more likely we are going to utilize the right heuristics.