Peter Ubel

This Friday, John McCain and Barack Obama will presumably (John McCain willing) square off in the first presidential debate of the season. For people like you, interested enough in politics to be reading this post, the outcome of the debate is already largely determined — your favorite candidate will not only win the debate, but your support of the candidate will be even stronger than before, and your view of his opponent — well, frankly, you will wonder why anyone could consider voting for him.

Debates are polarizing not simply because of their ridiculous formats, with red lights blinking when the time is up, and with embarrassing questions from the moderators followed by non-answers from the candidates. Instead, they are polarizing in large part because of the way people evaluate information on topics that they feel strongly about.

In a classic 1979 study, three Stanford psychologists recruited students who held strong opinions about the death penalty, and exposed them to hypothetical research results that either confirmed or challenged their established opinions.

Suppose you are one of the students and you begin the study already strongly opposed to the death penalty, because you don’t think it deters criminals. Imagine that the researchers now present you with a brief description of a new study that demonstrates a deterrence effect. How will you respond?

As it turns out, you’ll begin to waver… “Hmm, maybe I was making a hasty judgment,” you’ll wonder.

But now the researchers give you a longer description of the study. The study includes data from 10 states over a decade, analyzing homicide rates. Your brow begins to furrow: Only 10 states? And what about historical trends leading up to this time period? Why only one decade? And why didn’t they study more common violent crimes, like armed robbery? With this more elaborate information, you confidently conclude that the study is so seriously flawed that it does nothing to challenge your preconceived notion of the death penalty.

Meanwhile, another student reads the same study. This student, unlike you, has come in to the exercise favorably inclined toward the death penalty, and is very impressed with the study design: 10 whole states! For 10 whole years!

Kind of reminiscent of the Annie Hall scene, where Diane Keaton’s character is asked by her psychologist how often she and Woody’s character have sex, and she replies that they have sex practically all the time, too often in fact, something like three times a week. Meanwhile, Woody’s character is asked the same question by his psychologist, and provides a starkly different opinion — reporting that they almost never have sex, barely more than three times a week.

Like the characters in Annie Hall, the students and the Stanford came to very different conclusions even though they were exposed to the same facts. Indeed, those who favored the death penalty were quite critical of studies that denied a deterrence effect, while opponents of the death penalty thought the studies were quite excellent.

The findings from the Stanford study are even more distressing than I’ve described so far. You see, all the students were given examples of conflicting studies — one that proved deterrence and one that seemingly refuted it. All saw critiques of each study, as well as responses to the critiques. And the order of the studies was randomized by the researchers — pro or con — across students. Even the study designs were flipped around randomly: sometimes the pro-study took place in 10 states, and sometimes the con-study did.

The result? The more information students saw, the more polarized their opinions became. Pro-death penalty students became even more in favor of the death penalty, and those who were previously opposed to the death penalty became even more opposed to it.

We humans can’t help but perceive evidence through the lens of our existing beliefs. McCain will really prove to his detractors what a terrible president he will be, as will Obama to his detractors.

So when you wonder how your mother-in-law can watch the same debate you watched, and completely overlook the obvious flaws in her preferred candidate, remember that she is probably wondering the same thing about you.

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This week’s version of John McCain — the populist version — is blaming our current, um, situation on greed. (With such strong fundamentals in our economy, we couldn’t call it a crisis.)

Last week’s John McCain, and the one from the week before that, and the week before that, and the one who has served in the Senate for two decades, would not have been so negative about greed. As a fan of free markets, this long-standing version of McCain believed that greed pushed markets forward, causing people to take the kind of risks that propel economic innovation. The new McCain pretends that he believes markets are flawed because they encourage greed. The old McCain would have seen today’s banking debacle as a rational market correction to a decade of generous monetary policy from the Federal Reserve.

The old McCain was wrong to have such unfettered faith in markets. People are not nearly as rational as the market evangelists in the Republican Party would have us think.

But the new McCain, the one who insincerely blames our banking crisis on greed, is equally wrong. Rationally directed greed would never have led us to this crisis. Greed alone is not the cause of recent business failures. Trust me, the former directors of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are not jovially counting their earnings and laughing at us taxpayers for providing them with generous severance packages. The leaders of AIG and Lehman Brothers are not congratulating themselves for raking in the dough while running their companies into the ground. (That said, I think any solution to this problem should involve large paybacks from these extremely wealthy people.)

Both the old McCain and the new one don’t realize much more fundamental limitations of human nature that, when combined with unfettered markets, are a recipe for disaster. Let me illustrate one of these limits, a strange kind of herd mentality that infects our species, by asking you to imagine a situation that most of you will never be in.

You are a medical student, spending a month on your OB/GYN rotation, learning how to deliver babies and how to take care of female reproductive health. You’re spending the morning in the operating room, and the head surgeon has just finished prepping a patient. The patient is now anesthetized and the surgeon looks your way and says: “Hey student, come over here and feel this pelvic mass.” The surgeon is asking you to perform a pelvic examination on this woman, so you will be better at recognizing abnormal masses when you examine future patients. But you are concerned — you’ve never met this woman before, and you realize that you would be probing her most private parts without her permission, offering her no benefit at all. You would simply be practicing on her anesthetized body. What would you do?

When non-physicians are asked to consider the scenario, they say they wouldn’t feel right about examining this woman without her permission. Indeed, people entering medical school feel strongly that it is important to ask for such permission. But in my research, I have discovered that graduating medical students frequently feel that such permission is not necessary. In fact, they experience a significant shift in their opinions shortly after completing their OB/GYN rotations.

Why do students’ views change so much? Because they learn through example. They come to respect the surgeons conducting their training, and learn that the surgeons are generally good people — motivated to help patients and to teach students. So when respected surgeons invite them to conduct these pelvic examinations, their moral concerns clash with their opinion of the surgeons. Ultimately, many students reconcile this clash by becoming less concerned about the morality of examining women without their consent.

What do pelvic exams have in common with our banking crisis?

I expect that in the last few years, many financiers looked around and saw their peers taking on increasingly risky mortgages. Their rational sides worried that such practices were unacceptably risky. But honestly, who can calculate the exact risks of such practices? They knew that their peers were very smart. They recognized that the institutions their peers were working at were historically cautious. So they followed suit. Meanwhile, their peers glanced back in their direction, and came to the same conclusion.

People are often prey to social norms and peer pressure. We often judge our own behavior by comparing it to the people around us. Sometimes our rational instincts compete with these herd instincts, and in such cases the herd instincts often win.

What neither the old McCain nor the new McCain recognize is that free markets, for all their wonders, can be disastrous when left unfettered to compete with the irrational side of human nature.

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With the nomination of Sarah Palin as vice presidential candidate, the McCain campaign seems to hope that the election will hinge upon personality rather than policy, on candidates’ life narratives rather than their 15 point energy plans. Recognizing that they cannot win based on whose policies benefit the largest number of people — Republican health plans and tax cuts not being friendly to the middle class — the grand old party instead appears to be betting that the combination of an academically challenged military man and a moose killing hockey mom will resonate so much with voters that the electorate will ignore their policy proposals.

But it is dangerous to dismiss the Republican ticket as one of personality over policy, because for many voters, policy is inseparable from personality. You see, 15 point plans are inscrutable to most of the general public. For such people, the only way to evaluate such plans is through the lens of a candidate’ s life narrative, by sensing whether the candidate has come to the same conclusion about a topic that the voter would have come to if the voter had had the time to think things through.

Most people don’t have the inclination to become informed about complicated political issues. How should we handle Iran’s nuclear efforts or Russia’s aggression against Georgia? What should our country do about global warming, Medicare costs and the mortgage crisis? With most of our citizens still unable to find Iraq on a map, we can’t expect people to vote for presidential candidates based on the candidate’s vision for how to promote clean coal.

In a complicated world, many voters fall behind the candidate who they believe shares their values, and who comes culturally speaking from a place closest to their own. This explains part of the power of the three G.’s for the Republican Party: God, guns and gays. Ask people to list the most important issues facing the country, and the three G.’s won’t usually come out on top. But even though most voters care more about the economy than about whether to ban assault rifles, many of these same voters don’t have a clue about what the government should do to help the economy. So when two candidates spar over the economy, and one candidate “looks like me” — likes to hunt, say, or goes to a church like mine — whose economic plan am I going to trust?

In trying to identify which candidate thinks most like they think, many people also pay close attention to whether a candidate comes from their preferred party. In this respect, voters are a lot like sports fans. If, for example, the personnel of the Los Angeles Lakers were traded, whole cloth, for that of the Boston Celtics, Celtics fans would quickly embrace Kobe Bryant and his teammates while rooting against Paul Pierce and company. Sports fans are amazingly flexible in their attachment to specific personalities. I’m sure the Dallas fans hated Terrell Owens when he was on the Eagles, put off by his grand standing and poor sportsmanship. But now of course, with their Super Bowl hopes riding on his broad shoulders, most cowboy fans love him. Ultimately sports fans don’t seem to root for athletes as much as they support whoever is wearing the right color jersey. In much the same way, the general public supports the policies of the people in their parties. If George Bush had brought out a tax cut seven years ago that was geared largely towards the middle class, it would have been embraced by most members of his party. But once he settled on the current form of his tax cuts, most of the party faithful were quickly convinced that Bush had chosen the best possible way to cut taxes.

I don’t mean to take this point too far. Boston Celtics fans would still hold nostalgic feelings towards Paul Pierce if he was traded away, and would probably root for him to beat anyone but the Celtics. And voters who identify with the Republican Party will not go along with any policy that a Republican president puts forward. A Republican president who decided to ignore Roe V. Wade when nominating Supreme Court judge would quickly be vilified in the party. But for the hundreds of policies in which people don’t have strong preformed opinions — how to handle Fannie Mae, what to do about the globalization of the economy — the best way to figure out the right policy is for the voter to figure out which candidate is “most like me”.

Thus, we can expect the Republican base to rally behind McCain and the policies he proposes between now and November. And now, with Sarah Palin resonating with the Republican culture of small-town, gun toting individualists, the dismal policies that McCain is proposing could play an even smaller role in influencing people’s voting choices.

To win elections, it is not necessarily enough to favor policies that align with the interests of the middle class, because people in the middle-class won’t necessarily grasp the details of those policies. In saying this, I mean nothing but respect for most voters. It is simply impossible for most people, including myself, to become well-informed about more than a few important political issues.

Obama is right to point out the benefits of his tax cuts for the middle class, especially compared to McCain’s embrace of the Bush tax cuts. His campaign needs to push hard on the issues, showing people that the candidate has real substance behind his otherwise vague hopes. But if people think Obama is an elitist, his policies won’t resonate with them. That’s why Obama has to keep returning to his biography, and must do so in a way that not only sheds the elitist label the Republicans are trying to pin on him, but also emphasizes the commonness of his experiences. They must show that Obama, despite being such an extraordinary person — with an absent father from a foreign country, a long struggle for racial identity, and the brains and hard work to make law review at Harvard — is also like them.

The Obama team appears to be trying to address this issue. That is why we know more about Joe Biden’s train riding habits — knowing the name of each conductor — than about his efforts to promote the partitioning of Iraq a couple years ago. And that’s why those of us who are passionate about policy, and even informed about some policies, can expect to be disappointed by the way both campaigns are run over the next two months. Because both campaigns are likely to turn up the volume on personality and culture. We will see the Republicans work hard to make Obama look like he’s foreign, to make people suspicious about his policies. We can hope Obama counters these attacks with an effort to make himself look more normal, while highlighting the many ways in which the two Republican candidates are far from normal people.

For Obama to win, he needs to convince people that he shares their basic values, and that they can trust him to approach the many challenges of the Oval Office the same way they would approach them if they were forced to engage in the issues of our day.

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We are in the midst of what will certainly be the most expensive presidential campaign in history. The political powers are already inundating us with negative ads. The candidates are flying around the country in a frenzy, holding events and rallies with their partisan flocks. And the parties are putting finishing touches on their made-for-TV conventions, each of which will cost millions of dollars only to give the respective candidates a temporary boost in the polls.

Am I the only person who finds this process horribly inefficient? Why so much money, energy and time just to leave us with another election that will be determined by anti-Castro Cubans in Florida and exurban evangelicals in Ohio?

Fortunately, there is a better way, a truly American way to maximize the efficiency of the campaign. No, I’m not talking about settling the race with a hot dog eating contest. (My money would be on McCain.) Instead, I’m referring to a Scalia-like return to the Constitution, to the spirit of our founding fathers. I’m talking about taking the Electoral College to its logical conclusion, and awarding Electoral College votes not state-by-state, but county-by-county. My bold plan will give Americans what they want — the Constitutional right to remain blissfully ignorant about presidential politics. At the same time, it will allow a small cadre of voters to become energized by politics, because their concerns will actually matter to the candidates.

Let me briefly illustrate this plan.

I live in Michigan, a swing state that will be overrun by the campaigns well before November. As a Michigander (or, as some prefer, a Michiganian — unless you are from the Upper Pennisula, then you are a Yooper and everyone else is a Troll — because they live “under the bridge,” but I digress), I’ll be forced to unplug my phone and turn off my radios and TVs, to avoid the robo-calls and incessant advertisements that will inundate my unfortunate state come November. A county-based Electoral College plan would relieve me of this burden. My home is in Ann Arbor, you see, which is solidly Democratic; thus, under a county-based electoral plan, my neighbors and I will be robo-call free. My friends in Saline, a heavily Republican area, will also be spared. Detroit, Traverse City, East Lansing, and a few other Democratic strongholds — off the hook. Rural Michigan, a consistent Republican bastion — virtually ignored by the campaigns.

By my estimate, there would be only a couple counties in the entire state of Michigan up for grabs, with a total population of around 1500 voters. Assuming other states are like Michigan, and recognizing that Michigan has a larger population than most states, I roughly calculate that the county-based electoral College will leave the choice of our next president of the hands of 63,171 people (plus or minus 73 people, given the current rate of foreclosures).

Think about how efficient our campaigns would be if the candidates spent their time courting only these 63,000 people. The campaigns would quickly abandon television and radio ads, recognize that most of the advertisement revenue would be wasted on voters like me, who live in uncontested counties. Rallies in sports stadiums, town hall meetings in elks clubs — these, too, would be abandoned in favor of campaign events that targeted the “Swingin’ 63K.”

Even the political conventions would be more efficient with this plan, as each campaign would abandon its delegates in favor of flying the 63,171 “people who matter” into Colorado and Minnesota respectively, to court them up close.

Some people will no doubt complain that this county-based system abandons the idea of one person one vote. That it disenfranchises too many Americans. But it is the current system that disenfranchises voters. In our current system, Californians and Texans, New Yorkers and Louisianans, Montananites (you know, the people who wear those cool hats) and Mississippians, … all would be irrelevant to presidential politics, and thus their specific needs are ignored. A county-based Electoral College system would force campaigns to address issues in each of the 50 states (except North Dakota, according to my most recent analyses, where only one county is up for grabs with a total of seven voters; no system is perfect, alas).

What’s more, the new system, by focusing on such a small number of voters, would inevitably raise the quality of political debates. Like Iowans before the presidential primary, these voters would become extremely knowledgeable about politics. Heck, a good portion of them would have time for one-on-one meetings with the candidates, looking them in the eye to ask them unvetted questions (a chance to find someone to replace George Stephanopoulos on Sunday mornings), maybe even bowling with them (although the Obama campaign may try to interest them in a friendly game of H-O-R-S-E instead).

Disenfranchised? If that means being able to avoid negative campaign ads and dinner-thwarting robo-calls, then please disenfranchise me! Thanks to the Electoral College, the majority of Americans who go to the polls in November will cast meaningless votes, for candidates who have ignored their states in favor of a handful of swing states. Clearly the founding fathers, in creating the Electoral College, had a desire to make presidential campaigning more efficient. We owe it to these great men, then, to take their initial inspiration to its logical conclusion, and make the process even more efficient. It is time to make almost everyone’s votes meaningless, so the Swingin’ 63K can do the important work of educating themselves about the candidates, and choosing our next president.

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As person, I’ve always been a contrarian. To quote Bruce Springsteen: when they said sit down I stood up.

As a scientist, I’ve wedded my contrarian nature with a healthy dose of skepticism. When the majority of people in my field believe one thing, I’m the one looking for reasons they are all wrong.

So when scientists began to conclude that human beings were contributing to global warming, I was dubious. However, as I read various reports on global warming, my skepticism began to wane. A wide range of studies all seemed to be pointing in the same direction.

Then the Wall Street Journal came out with an editorial appealing to my contrarian instincts, warning readers to: “beware claims that the science of global warming is settled.” In an editorial from February 5, 2007, the Journal claimed to show just how much the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, had been backpedaling on key predictions.

This wasn’t minor backpedaling in the view of the Wall Street Journal, but “startling revisions of previous UN predictions.” In the 2001 report, “the UN’s best high-end estimate of rising sea levels by 2100 was 3 feet.” The newest report has a high-end estimate of only 17 inches.

At this point in the editorial, my contrarian desire to join the Journal in questioning global warming slammed into another of my personality characteristics: I hate when people insult my intelligence. I noticed that the Wall Street Journal failed to mention what the low-end estimate was from 2001. And in this omission lies the fallaciousness of their thinking, or more sinisterly, the deviousness of their ways.

It has to do with confidence. Confidence intervals to be precise. Scientific estimates are not perfect, and therefore when scientists begin to collect data on a new topic, their estimates come with margins of error attached — confidence intervals, the plus or minus statements so familiar in political polling. For example, after a couple basketball games, it is difficult to predict what the season-long scoring average is going to be for, say, LeBron James. If he gets 10 points the first game and 30 points the second game, does that mean he’ll have a season scoring average of 20? We can statistically estimate what his scoring average will be, but we need to put a wide confidence interval around that estimate. As the season progresses, we’re going to have a much better idea of the average number of points James is going to be putting up per night. Our high-end estimate of his scoring average will come down, and our low-end estimate will come up.

Confidence intervals, you see, get narrower both from the top end and the bottom end.

Climate change of course is a much more complex thing to predict than basketball scores or election polls. There are many more sources of uncertainty. So we can expect wide confidence intervals, as scientists begin to grapple with the complex problem. If we want to know whether people are reversing their scientific predictions, we need to look not only at how they have revised their high-end estimates but also how they have revised their low-end estimates.

Somehow this balanced approach seemed to escape the Wall Street Journal editorial writers. They only mentioned the high-end estimates. And they seemed to act as if scientists, when revising their estimates over time, are somehow reversing their opinions.

Can we blame the Wall Street Journal editorialists for overlooking the importance of confidence intervals? After all they’re not scientists or statisticians, they’re just reporters.

But I think it is hardly possible that they could have been unaware of confidence intervals. After all, these people have advanced knowledge of financial and investment matters. And any knowledgeable investor knows that the more you diversify your investments, the more you minimize your risks. If you buy one or two stocks, both could crash and burn this year or both could take off. Your predicted yield might be, say, 10% per year, but this prediction would come with a wide confidence interval–you might lose everything, or you might make a fortune.

By contrast, if you buy lots of stocks, or if you buy mutual funds that invest in hundreds of companies, your average return will remain around 10%, but your confidence interval will narrow. Not all of these companies can tank at the same time, and not all of them can quadruple in value. So even though your expected return will be the same, your high-end and low-end estimates will be dramatically different.

So how could the Wall Street Journal, of all publications, have made such an egregious mistake? Did they overlook parallels between market diversification and global warming forecasts? Or did they purposely mislead readers? Are they fools or liars?

To avoid casting aspersions on them, perhaps it is best to simply say that they were full of hot air!

Peter Ubel is Professor of Medicine and Psychology at the University of Michigan, author of You’re Stronger Than You Think, and is currently writing a book on capitalism and human nature.

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