On Fri, 7 Oct 2005, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Call me crazy, but watching American politics, there seems to be a lot of
> incoherence. 2/3 of Bush voters thought he supported Kyoto. That's mad. How
> can so many people believe such ridiculous things?
>
> Doug
Social cognition researchers argue that people tend to be "cognitive misers": they apply cognitive effort when they are motivated or are provided with significant incentives; otherwise, they rely on simple heuristics (e.g., american flag = good, charisma=trustworthy, truth = what legitimate authority figures say). --Frankly, many voters could care less whether Bush supports some particular policy, because they're not voting on the basis of careful, evidence based reasoning; they're voting on basis of simple heuristics. They have more important things to think about than Bush's position on the Kyoto protocol or whether any 9/11 terrorists were Iraqis.
I want to emphasize that none of this should be construed as a Woj-style rant about ignorant Americans; in fact, I think that spending less cognitive effort on political minutia has its advantages. It is true that we only have a limited amount of cognitive effort we can draw upon in a specific period of time; who's to say the best way to use that cognitive effort is to understand the complexities of national and international politics?
Miles