Politicians and quantum "flip-flops"

One update (below)

As the campaign for the U.S. Presidential election gains momentum, we're once again subjected to the irritating spectacle of candidates responding to simple questions with paragraphs of vacuous waffle, and mouthing totally contradictory opinions to different groups. It's tempting, and maybe partially correct, to suspect they're all just slippery and mealy-mouthed weasels. But here's another idea: maybe the way they act has its origins in a deeper problem inherent in the mathematics of democracy and public opinion. There's good reason to believe that a candidate can appeal to more people by holding several contradictory views all at once.

The French philosopher, the Marquis de Condorcet, once proved a truly surprising theorem about public opinion. As individuals, people tend to be logically consistent in their opinions or preferences. If I prefer Obama over Clinton, and Clinton over Romney, then I'll also prefer Obama over Romney. If A outranks B, and B outranks C, then A should outrank C. Most of our thinking conforms to this basic rule of logic, at least most of the time.

But just because individual preferences follow such logic, this doesn't imply that groups do as well. Within a population of people, Condorcet proved, it is entirely possible for a majority to prefer A over B, a majority to prefer B over C, and a majority also to prefer C over A - making a cycle of collective preference, so that's its impossible to say which of A, B or C the people really prefer. (For example, take three voters who, respectively, rank three policy alternatives in the following orders: A > B > C, C > A > B, and B > C > A. It is easy to see that two out of three will prefer A over B, B over C, and yet also C over A.)

Nearly a decade ago, physicist David Meyer of the University of California at San Diego, and political scientist Thad Brown of the University of Missouri, suggested that this peculiar logic of popular opinion might well have something to do with the slippery views of politicians. Think of a candidate who just tries to mouth opinions that match up as closely as possible with the majority view. Quite possibly those opinions will necessarily involve some contradictions and apparently irrational cycles of preference. If so, then candidates and their advisors face a real choice between a strategy that respects ordinary logic, with the candidate promoting the kinds of consistent preferences than an individual might hold, and another in which the candidate abandons the need for consistency and uses more flexible and slippery tactics to appeal to as many voters as possible.

I'm guessing that almost all candidates follow the latter strategy, and those who don't tend to fall out of the polls very quickly. I recall being excited some years ago at the early Presidential candidacy of Governor of Arizona Bruce Babbit, who seemed to speak entirely sensibly about the importance of things like education, public health, investment in the nation's infrastructure, etc. He was so sensible and intelligent that his polling number quickly fell into the single digits and he dropped out of the race in about three weeks.

I suspect that experienced politicians may get drawn into adopting strategic contradictions more or less unconsciously, as they study polls and the results of focus groups and try to say things that put them in touch with the voters. "This," as Meyer and Brown put it, "is why it’s so hard for us as voters to discern exactly for what they stand."

The naive view of political strategy might hold that if most peoples' views fall into three sets, A, B, and C, which you might visualize in some "policy space," then the politician does best by "triangulating" -- setting out a position that falls at the center of those views. This way he or she appeals at least a little to everyone. But if cycles exist among the voting public, then a better bet may be to occupy not one point in policy space, but to spread out over a region and, roughly speaking, be as inconsistent as the voters.

Maybe there's a kind of perverse quantum logic to flip-flopping: just as quantum particles don't exist at any one point, but act as quantum waves and spread out through space, politicians defy the logic of individual thinking, and benefit by having fuzzy and ill-defined views.

Update

Just after I posted this, I remembered another interesting point relevant to this problem of Condorcet cycles in public opinion. The importance of the matter depends, of course, on the actual likelihood that public opinion really does show such cycles. Condorcet proved that it can. But in reality, does this happen very often?

Some physicists, Matteo Marsili and Giacomo Rafaelli, looked into this a few years ago. Their idea was to assume that individuals in a big population rank a series of alternatives, A, B, C, ... and so on in a random order. Each person has his or her own ranking, determined at random. Then they asked -- what is the chance, mathematically, that you'll find cycles in the group preferences when these people vote on the various alternatives in pairs? They vote on A versus B, A versus C, B versus C and so on. How likely is it that their voting shows a cycle? Their results showed that as the number of alternatives gets reasonable large, the chance of not having cycles dwindles rapidly to zero.

So if peoples' preferences were random, cycles are almost a guarantee. Of course, preferences aren't random, but treating them as such is at least crude approximation. And it suggests that the trouble presented by cycles, and the waffling strategies they make effective, may indeed be real.

On caveat, however -- Marsili and Rafaelli also showed that the tendency of people to conform with the views of others may play a powerful role in preventing Condorcet cycles and making the public's collective views more "rational" than they would otherwise be.

Deliberation difficulties

Getting back to group polarization and the problems of deliberation. Following on from the original essay in my New York Times column, I posted again on the topic a few weeks ago, exploring recent experiments by Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago and colleagues on the phenomenon of group polarization. They found -- and a wealth of other evidence also supports this view -- that when people are brought together into discussion, the group often ends up coming to a consensus that is more extreme than the original views of the people making it up. You can read this paper here; it's due out soon on the California Law Review.

In an earlier paper in the Yale Law Journal, Deliberative Trouble? Why Groups Go to Extremes, Sunstein mentions, for example, a classic study in the 1960s that found what is called "the risky shift." The experiments had graduate students in management respond to questions involving attitudes toward risk. After answering, the students then engaged in open deliberation on the questions. The experiment found that the students in their deliberations almost always moved toward expressing more aggressive attitudes towards taking risks, stronger than they had privately.

By the way, if you have some time, read the Sunstein paper which talks about a number of similar examples. It's both illuminating and a great deal of fun to read.

But there is obviously a lot more to what happens in deliberation that a tendency toward polarization. The Sunstein et al. experiments show that groups of people who are relatively similar in their views to begin with -- say, a group of Democrats, or a group of Republicans -- after deliberation, come to a greater consensus (as well as becoming more extreme and, one might say, convinced in the rightness of their views). But what if people aren't similar? What if Democrats and Republicans try to discuss the issues together?

In a comment to that post, John Savage wrote that...

I’m unsure why you cite the Sunstein study as a test of the hypothesis that “deliberation days” would help to break down differences, when the experiment actually involved intentionally segregating liberals and conservatives, with the unremarkable result that both groups became more extreme.

At the end, you come to an optimistic conclusion from a centrist point of view: that somehow bringing liberals and conservatives together in a common forum would quickly break down their differences. As a political blogger, I just find this intuitively wrong.... two groups of “extremists” on opposite sides would probably not moderate each other’s views by talking to each other, no matter how many “links” you tried to provide between them.

Indeed, I didn't mean to imply that the Sunstein et al. study supports the idea that deliberation days would break down differences. What it offers is more of a cautionary lesson -- that if you're going to have deliberation days, you'd better try to get lots of diversity in your groups, because if you don't, you may well make the polarization even bigger. Logically speaking, the study doesn't say *anything* about what you're likely to see in groups where you *do* have lots of diversity and polarization. It just doesn't address that situation at all.

Since then I've been wondering about this. Cass in an email offered some views on what tends to happen in groups that do have great diversity, say both staunch Republicans and Democrats. As we all know from wandering in the poltical regions of the blogosphere, you tend to find persisting if not heightened polarization. Cass suggests that this tends to be the outcome whenever people clearly recognize and identify themselves with some group, such as a political party. The "identity differences" make it difficult for either group really to listen and take the points of the other side seriously.

I've come across some other fascinating work that also touches on this point. For example, in a nice paper entitled Modeling Cultural Cognition, Dan M. Kahan, Donald Braman, and James Grimmelmann (of Yale, George Washington and New York Law Schools respectively) argue that people who strongly hold different opinions -- on an issue such as gun control, for example -- often do so largely for powerful cultural reasons that make them relatively impervious to persuasion. As they put it, "culture is prior to facts in individual cognition."

The idea is that for a number of fairly basic psychological mechanisms, people tend to hold the same beliefs as most people in their own cultural group (Republicans, economists, academic physicists, etc.). And these views do not easily get swayed in the light of new evidence. Rather, "the beliefs so formed operate as an evidentiary filter, inducing individuals to dismiss any contrary evidence as unreliable, particularly when that evidence is proffered by individuals of an opposing cultural affiliation."

Now I think we can all relate to that observation. I can present all the new climate studies I want, published in Nature, Science, wherever, to my determined climate-skeptic friends, and even if they listen politely (rolling their eyes occasionally), I know they just don't accept it. It doesn't sink in as new, legitimate information. And from my side, no new "study" on climate change written up by anyone from the American Enterprise Institute is likely to change my mind (see, I couldn't even help but put quotes around the word "study"!).

A more important question, of course, is how it might be possible to design strategies to get past these entrenched cultural differences that make it virtually impossible for people to come to agreement, even in the context of full information. You need to devise strategies for deliberation so that people can take on new information without having their cultural certainty threatened (at least not too rapidly). Seems like a tall order.

But I did hear recently of some researchers in Belgium, coming out of ecology, I think, who were devising just this sort of strategy, and using it, apparently effectively, in practice, bringing together business people with environmental activists to work together on land use issues, for example. I'll post on this soon if I can find out more about it. What I remember of the idea is that they bring the polarized parties together and first have them discuss all those things on which they AGREE, which usually are quite a lot. They establish common ground, and at least a little bit of trust, and then gradually take small steps away from that.