Welcome to Behavioral Politics
Last week, Mark Zuckerberg reacted to the suggestion that fake news on Facebook affected the outcome of the election. “Personally, I think the idea that fake news on Facebook — it’s a very small amount of the content — influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea,” he said.
This is disingenuous on its face, given Facebook’s business model, but typical of advertising’s historical self-defense. When it addresses industry, advertising has amazing powers to change behavior and deliver sales. When talking to the government or the public, advertising insists that it barely works.
Beyond that, however, I don’t think Zuckerberg — and most of us — appreciate the extent to which we’ve entered an age of behavioral politics, with chilling consequences for our ideas of rationality and democracy.
There has been a revolution in economics in recent years, a spate of research grouped under the banner of “behavioral economics,” that has — to my mind — convincingly demolished the idea of the classical economic subject on which our economics, and politics, rest.
William Poundstone’s Priceless The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It) is a good survey. The basic idea is that psychologists have created a growing body of research testing the received idea that we act to maximize value in economic transactions. It turns out we don’t, and that — in fact — we are almost laughably influenced by irrelevant factors.
The most familiar example is the $50,000 purse in a high-end luggage store. Almost nobody buys it, but the presence of the high price pulls acceptable prices in the rest of the store up by a predictable percentage. This phenomenon is called “anchoring.”
The most amusing part of Poundstone’s book comes when researchers tried to see how irrelevant they could make a number and still have it affect price estimates. In one study, they gave subjects a folder to carry to their interview. The folder had a subject number printed on it. The higher a subject’s number, the higher their price estimates.
This has some non-amusing implications, namely that we cannot rely on the idea of the rational subject when it comes economics — or politics. This revelation is not really unknown to us as it applies to politics. Studies of implicit bias reveal the same thing and corporations helpfully dispatch consultants to train employees to spot their racial, gender, and other biases. (These sessions do not, of course, train employees — in their roles as consumers — to spot anchor-based price gouging, but that’s another story.)
But it seems to me, in light of this evidence, that Liberal politics may have put too much faith in the coherent, humanist subject — at least to win elections.
That the GOP had left this bias behind first appeared in the non-reality-based world of the Bush administration. During the week, there would be some shocking revelation, then on Sunday Cheney would hit the morning shows and deny it flat. Liberals were incredulous.
Why doesn’t the media point it out? How can anyone believe the GOP’s contradictory story?
As we know now — after bringing plenty of fact-checking to a culture war, as Clay Shirky glossed it in the run-up — the media does point it out, but the contradictions don’t matter. Cheney did not go on the Sunday shows to tell a coherent story — which we Liberals demanded — but to drop anchors, to scrawl a number on the wall that would subtly distort estimations of reality.
The basic way consumer goods companies use anchoring is by launching loss-leading premium brands that drive sales to the mid-priced brand. Given two choices, consumers will choose the cheapest. Given three, they will choose the middle one, so the cost of launching the more expensive brand is made up on sales of the middle brand.
This is where the culpability of fake news on Facebook lies. In a marketplace of ideas with Competent Hillary and Benghazi Hillary, you might get one split, but if you add Sex Trafficker Hillary to the shelf, Benghazi Hillary looks like a reasonable, compromise version of reality, and you vote accordingly.
By addressing itself to this fragmented, behavioral subject — perhaps without even realizing it is doing so — the GOP, as we have seen, has itself become fragmented, an incoherent ball of anchors which cannot be reconciled, but which nevertheless delivers votes.
How can Liberalism adapt to this post-humanist politics and retain its humanity? Can it afford to fight fire with fire, or will it lose itself in the process? Or does it need to find a way to reaffirm the ideal of the dignified, coherent subject, flawed though it might be? What would that look like, knowing what we now know?
