Last week’s death of social psychologist Daniel Kahneman, 90, was commemorated by economists across the world even though he never studied economics even as an undergraduate. But he did win the 2002 Nobel Prize for economic science.
Puzzles, biases and paradoxes were core to Kahneman’s insights. In fact, he, along with his lifetime collaborator Amos Tversky (who died in 1996), revolutionised not just economics but the entire world of decision-making. They exposed, through a series of groundbreaking experiments, how humans erred systematically when making judgements amid uncertainty and with an information overload to contend with. In other words, human intuition is very powerful and very often wrong.
Often, we make our decisions on what the pair called “systematic bias” – and to get to an answer in a short time, even when the question is complex, we rely of what the duo called “heuristics” or mental shortcuts (Kahneman called it a “mental shotgun”) to use “an off-the-shelf answer to a very difficult question”.
‘Emotional attitudes’
Kahneman and Tversky introduced the concept of behavioural economics, hence the Nobel prize award for Kahneman. But their thinking, popularised in Kahneman’s 2011 best-seller Thinking Fast and Slow goes way beyond economics and applies to decisions large (Will the Russians unleash World War 3)and small (Where to go for your next holiday).
Who you should vote for on 29 May is a small question that has huge implications.
Kahneman devotes but a few paragraphs in his 480-page book to political choices and how they are made, but, as ever, he is both insightful and original. He notes that political choices and preferences are, par excellence, a case of the dominance of conclusions over arguments, especially since emotions are involved: “[It is] an affect heuristic in which people let their likes and dislikes determine their beliefs about the world. Your political beliefs determine the arguments you find compelling.”
He then cites some examples, ranging from nuclear power to motorbike safety, and observes that “your emotional attitudes … likes and dislikes drive your beliefs about their benefits and their risks. If you dislike any of these things, you probably believe its risks are high and its benefits negligible”.
Viewed from this perspective, the current election campaign and, certainly, earnest policy wonks pouring over party manifestos are almost a complete waste of time and money. The decision for most voters is prebaked and will not likely shift much.
Except, as Kahneman caveated his finding:
This certainly applies to so-called “swing voters” who are disillusioned with their current political homes or are marked in opinion surveys as “undecided” or “won’t say”.
The posters currently adorning the streetlamps of South Africa are, in a few words, the heuristic – how the parties want to portray themselves and paint their opponents.
“Rescue SA” is the DA’s two-word heuristic, providing a shortcut to the welter of wrongs and failures inflicted on the country by the ANC government.
“Fix SA” is the slightly less dramatic but equivalent offering of ActionSA.
The ANC, which hasn’t offered much in the poster war stakes so far, has an anodyne slogan that offers no shortcut at all to a decision: “Let’s do more together.” Though another of Tversky and Kahneman’s findings will offer a crumb of comfort to the beleaguered governing party: When confronted with a difficult choice, most people have a bias in favour of the status quo. Sort of a “better the devil you know” idea in electoral politics.
Of course, there are other heuristics which do not (yet) appear on election posters but certainly do feature in negative campaigning: The ANC is corrupt and incompetent; the DA is a white and arrogant party; the smaller parties are spoilers and vote-splitters; former president Jacob Zuma is a misogynist danger to the constitutional order; the EFF is racist and populist … The list goes on.
‘Optimistic bias’
Each proponent of these attacks will offer some evidence for the assertion. But none of this is aimed at suggesting voters take a deep dive into the facts. Rather, it is an invitation to save the voter time and effort. It is a fast, intuitive, emotional summary. Kahneman calls this “fast thinking”, though he does indicate that it can lead to the wrong conclusion. By contrast, there is “slow thinking” which is more deliberative and considered. This usually yields a more accurate judgement.
President Cyril Ramaphosa, on the campaign trail, offers a splendid example of what Kahneman identified as the “optimistic bias”, as he goes around the country reciting statistics to prove life has never been better: More houses, water(!), electricity (!), economic opportunity, grants and other services.
However, since Ramaphosa’s baseline of comparison is the vanquished apartheid government of 1993 – whose purpose was to disfavour black South Africans – his is a dubious set of claims, especially as a vast majority of voters, according to polls, think the country is moving in the wrong direction.
According to the eNCA Markdata poll, the top three priorities for voters are jobs, electricity and crime. And no amount of campaign rhetoric can change the lived experiences of voters, which, on this tryptic and on all the data, are in deep red territory.
Of course, whatever the evidence and biases, it hardly comports with being a political leader in the middle of an election campaign to go on an apology tour or to accentuate your own negatives. The “optimistic bias” drives the turnout of, at least, your own supporters. Hence, for example, the inflated claims of voter support.
ActionSA’s Herman Mashaba claims his party (now around 2% in the polls) will outperform the DA (at over 20% in polls) on election day; Songezo Zibi, who is in the margin of error of most polls, claims his Rise Mzansi will get 7% of the vote come 29 May.
Heuristics, of course, change over time and are susceptible to more information. Ramaphosa is the prime example of this. If you applied a heuristic to him when he became president in 2018, the shortcut description for most people, including non-ANC voters, would have been along the lines of “not Zuma”, “a good leader”, “business friendly”, “corruption buster”. The scant evidence for each of these assertions was beside the point. These were the emotions of people who had suffered under Zuma’s rule of ruin and were desperate for a saviour to lift the country out of the mire.
If you today applied a heuristic test to Ramaphosa, the summary would be less flattering, though, as events have proved, perhaps more accurate: “Weak and indecisive”, “Phala Phala”, “water and electricity crises” …
Of course, the lingering attachments to the 2018 heuristic and the strong, if fading, grip of the ANC on people’s loyalty explains why even though Ramaphosa’s popularity has sharply declined, he still outperforms every other political leader.
How to explain the continued popularity of Zuma and his fast-charging Umkhonto weSizwe Party is difficult, and the heuristics on him (“uBaba” to “corrupt crook”) are completely divided. Zuma has shrugged off an alleged life-threatening illness and still charms crowds, from rural folk to gatherings of Afrikaners, with his singing and dancing and his one-off offer (in the absence of any policies) that Ramaphosa is a disaster.
As good an explanation as any on his continued political primacy was offered back in July 2022 by Financial Times journalist Janen Ganesh. He offered the idea of “the vibes theory of politics”, and with a nod to Kahneman and Tversky, he said, “beliefs are often just unexamined tribal loyalties”.
Political tribes are a key to understanding politics, and no one in this country – whatever the cost – has been better at exploiting tribal politics than Zuma.
And people form loyalties on hunches and biases more than on detailed information. Let’s see how this plays out in May.
