It’s Not Just Bush Staying the Course
Nobody saw the electoral tidal wave of 1994 coming. Yet because it came, the press is coming down hard on pollsters and pundits to predict whether it’s going to happen in 2006. And the pundits are taking the bait with near-guarantees or stronger, despite the shifting sands and the unknowable yet critical factors. The polls or scandals may change quite a bit in the days to come, but the work of one professor of psychology, Robert Cialdini, leads me to believe that predictions, once made, are not likely to reflect the new information. Pundits, in other words, are likely to stay the course. Here are a few paragraphs from Cialdini’s book, Influence:
Public commitments tend to be lasting commitments.
…
Whenever one takes a stand that is visible to others, there arises a drive to maintain that stand in order to look like a consistent person. Remember…how desirable good personal consistency is as a trait; how someone without it may be judged as fickle, uncertain, pliant, scatterbrained, or unstable; how someone with it is viewed as rational, assured, trustworthy, and sound. Given this context, it is hardly surprising that people try to avoid the look of inconsistency. For appearances’ sake, then, the more public a stand, the more reluctant we will be to change it.
An illustration of the way public commitments can lead to consistent further action was provided in a famous experiment performed by two prominent social psychologists…The basic procedure was to have college students first estimate in their minds the length of lines they were shown. At this point, one sample of the students had to commit themselves publicly to their initial judgments by writing their estimates down, signing their names to them, and turning them in to the experimenter. A second sample of students also committed themselves to their first estimates, but they did so privately by writing them down on a Magic Writing Pad and then erasing them by lifting the Magic Pad’s plastic cover before anyone could see what they had written. A third set of students did not commit to their initial estimates at all; they just kept the estimates in mind privately.
In these ways, [the experimenters] had cleverly arranged for some students to commit themselves publicly, some privately, and some not at all, to their initial decisions. What [the experimenters] wanted to find out was which of the three types of students would be most inclined to stick with their first judgments after receiving information that those judgments were incorrect. Therefore, all the students were given new evidence suggesting that their initial estimates were wrong, and they were given the chance to change their estimates.
The results were quite clear. The students who had never written down their first choices were the least loyal to those choices. When new evidence was presented that questioned the wisdom of decisions that had never left their heads, these students were the most influenced by the new information to change what they had viewed as the “correct” decision. Compared to these uncommitted students, those who had merely written their decisions for a moment on a Magic Pad were significantly less willing to change their minds when given the chance. Even though they had committed themselves under anonymous circumstances, the act of writing down their first judgments caused them to resist the influence of contradictory new data and to remain consistent with their preliminary choices. However, [the experimenters] found that, by far, it was the students that had publicly recorded their initial positions who most resolutely refused to shift from those positions later. Public commitments had hardened them into the most stubborn of all.
The moral of this story? Beware of predictions already made by campaign professionals regarding the House and the Senate. Pundits are people, too! They have at least as much interest in consistency as everybody else. Even if the district-by-district polls prove anything but consistent.
Thanks to Warren Buffett’s partner, Charlie Munger, for referring often to Cialdini’s book in speeches and elsewhere. Very fun and amazingly relevant.
