The Psychology of Political Decisions

Before we get to the fun of college football, we need to provide a bit of background. In Introducing Emotions in Politics, we examined how emotions and moods can affect judgments and decisions in unrelated situations.¹Bechara, Antoine and Antonio R. Damasio. 2005. “The Somatic Marker Hypothesis: A Neural Theory of Economic Decision.” Games and Economic Behavior 52 (2): 336-372. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geb.2004.06.010.²Forgas, Joseph P. 1995. “Mood and Judgment: The Affect Infusion Model (AIM).” Psychological Bulletin 117(1): 39-66. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0033-2909.117.1.39.³Forgas, Joseph P., Simon M. Laham, and Patrick T. Vargas. 2005. “Mood Effects on Eyewitness Memory: Affective Influences on Susceptibility to Misinformation.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 41 (6): 574-588. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2004.11.005.⁴Lerner, Jennifer S. and Dacher Keltner. 2000. “Beyond Valence: Toward a Model of Emotion-Specific Influences on Judgment and Choice.” Cognition and Emotion 14 (4): 473-493. https://doi.org/10.1080/026999300402763.⁵Lerner, Jennifer S. and Dacher Keltner. 2001. “Fear, Anger, and Risk.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81 (1): 146-159. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.81.1.146.⁶Martin, Leonard L. and Gerald L. Clore. 2001. Theories of Mood and Cognition: A User’s Handbook. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.⁷Schwarz, Norbert and Gerald L. Clore. 1983. “Mood, Misattribution, and Judgments of Well-Being: Informative and Directive Functions of Affective States.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 45 (3): 513-523. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.45.3.513. In other words, emotions produced in one situation can affect behavior in a completely unrelated situation.

In general, emotions are essential for good (rational) decision-making.⁸Bechara, Antoine and Antonio R. Damasio. 2005. “The Somatic Marker Hypothesis: A Neural Theory of Economic Decision.” Games and Economic Behavior 52 (2): 336-372. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geb.2004.06.010.⁹Bechara, Antoine, Hanna Damasio, Daniel Tranel, and Antonio R. Damasio. 1997. “Deciding Advantageously Before Knowing the Advantageous Strategy.” Science 275 (5304): 1293-1295. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.275.5304.1293.¹⁰Damasio, Antonio R. 1994. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Penguin Books. Without emotions, we have no interests. We can gather all the relevant information and weigh each option, but without emotions, we don’t prefer a particular option. We also don’t know when enough is enough, and we need to make a final decision. Consider what happens when you purchase a new car. It can be a daunting process. There is so much information out there, and it is easy to get lost in it all. Thankfully, emotions help us out. They’ll give us a feeling about which information is most relevant to our personal decision. They’ll also tell us when we’ve wasted too much time and need to make a final decision. Without interests, decision-making is all but impossible.

However, emotions that are unrelated to our current decision can be disruptive. In Introducing Emotions in Politics, we used the example of driving. If you receive a phone call about a death in the family while driving, the emotions produced from this terrible news will likely have a negative effect on your driving behavior.¹¹Bechara, Antoine and Antonio R. Damasio. 2005. “The Somatic Marker Hypothesis: A Neural Theory of Economic Decision.” Games and Economic Behavior 52 (2): 336-372. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geb.2004.06.010, page 351. We need emotions to be successful drivers, but we need ones that help us to assess risks and manage dangers on the road.

While it might be more difficult to notice the disruptive effects of carryover emotions on our own decisions, think about your interactions with family, friends, co-workers, and strangers. You’ll often come away from an interaction with an impression of that person’s mood based on how they are behaving. A bank teller (yes, they still exist) shouldn’t treat you any differently based on how they are feeling that day, but they most surely do. The probability of your child giving you a hug after school shouldn’t be affected by how their day went (it isn’t your fault that Lucy didn’t want to sit with them at lunch), but it is. Our emotions, our moods carry over into different aspects of our lives.

How might this affect voting behavior? Scholars identify different ways that people might rationally approach voting decisions.¹²Healy, Andrew J., Neil Malhotra, and Cecilia Hyunjung Mo. 2010. “Irrelevant Events Affect Voters’ Evaluations of Government Performance.” PNAS 107 (29): 12804-12809. https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1007420107, page 12804 First, voters might evaluate the policy platforms of the different candidates and choose the candidate that best matches their interests. Second, voters might evaluate the incumbent’s performance while in office. Voting based on how you view the current government is called retrospective voting.¹³Fiorina, Morris P. 1981. Retrospective Voting in American National Elections. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.¹⁴Healy, Andrew and Neil Malhotra. 2013. “Retrospective Voting Reconsidered.” Annual Review of Political Science 16: 285-306. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-032211-212920.¹⁵Page, Benjamin I. and Robert Y. Shapiro. 1992. The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans’ Policy Preferences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

While political science and economics research is generally skeptical of voter rationality, most theories assume that voters are sufficiently rational to not allow irrelevant events to affect their decisions. However, research in political psychology shows that emotions that are unrelated to voting decisions can affect both policy evaluations and retrospective voting. For example, when evaluating others, people who believe that things are going well (or bad) spend more time focusing on the good (or bad) characteristics of other people and situations ¹⁶Forgas, Joseph P. 1995. “Mood and Judgment: The Affect Infusion Model (AIM).” Psychological Bulletin 117(1): 39-66. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0033-2909.117.1.39.¹⁷ Healy, Andrew J., Neil Malhotra, and Cecilia Hyunjung Mo. 2010. “Irrelevant Events Affect Voters’ Evaluations of Government Performance.” PNAS 107 (29): 12804-12809. https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1007420107, page 12804 Similarly, when someone is in a good mood, they remember events more favorably and interpret their current situation more favorably than when they are in a bad mood.¹⁸ Isen, Alice M., Thomas E. Shalker, Margaret Clark, and Lynn Karp. 1978. “Affect, Accessibility of Material in Memory, and Behavior: A cognitive loop?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36 (1): 1-12. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0022-3514.36.1.1. When someone is sad, they are more likely to believe that events are caused by factors beyond someone’s control.¹⁹Keltner, Dacher, Phoebe C. Ellsworth, and Kari Edwards. 1993. “Beyond Simple Pessimism: Effects of Sadness and Anger on Social Perception.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 64 (3): 740-752. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.64.5.740, pages 743-745. They are less likely to blame others for negative outcomes. Conversely, when someone is angry, they are more likely to believe that events (even those unrelated to their anger) are to be blamed on others.

Unless a voter is examining only one candidate’s policy platform, carryover emotions are unlikely to have a large effect on voting decisions based on policy evaluations. However, it can have a profound impact on retrospective voting. With retrospective voting, the voter is only evaluating the party/candidate currently in power. While the examples above are only a limited sample of the different effects that emotions can have on voting, it still allows us to reach some conclusions. First, consider whether the person is in a good or a bad mood. If a voter is in a good mood, they would be more likely to focus on positive memories from the current government’s time in office and to evaluate their current situation more favorably. In other words, people will be more likely to remember the good times and to focus on the good parts of their lives. If a voter is in a bad mood, they are more likely to focus on negative memories and to evaluate their current situation more negatively.

The effects of negative emotions and moods on voting will depend on whether the person is angry or sad. If the voter is angry, they are likely to blame the current government for policy failures and for their current negative situation. However, if the voter is sad, they are more likely to concede that the policy failures and their current situation were beyond the control of the government. For angry voters, the likelihood of them voting for the incumbent is greatly decreased. For sad voters, the effects are less clear. On the one hand, they are focused on negative memories and have a negative view of their current situation. On the other hand, they are likely to believe that this situation would be the same no matter who is in power. The important takeaway is that a voter is likely to evaluate the performance of a politician/government differently from day to day and that this difference has more to do with their mood than with changes in their actual life circumstances (e.g., career, finances, health, family situation, values, interests, etc.).