Over- and Under-reactions in politics

You will all have had experience of somebody flying off the handle on the slightest provocation – brushing against them in a crowded pub, or pulling out in front of them in traffic. I suspect this everyday behaviour helps us understand politics.

What I mean is that there’s a tendency to over-react to small offences and under-react to larger ones. We see this on both left and right.

On the left, compare austerity to Johnson’s recent Islamophobic remarks. Yes, the latter has led to some deplorable attacks on Muslim women. But austerity has been many thousand times worse. Not only has it made us much worse off than we’d otherwise be, but it also caused Brexit (pdf) with the social divisions and poverty that’ll result, and it might well have caused thousands of deaths to boot. And yet there isn’t thousands of times more anger at Brexit than there has been about Johnson.

And on the right, the abuse Corbyn is getting for the very serious allegation that he’s a terrorist sympathizer doesn’t seem much greater than that Ed Miliband got for eating a bacon sandwich inelegantly*.

The ratio of outrage to cause is large for small causes, but smaller for greater causes.

There are two analogies here. One is with the certainty effect: people pay more to reduce probabilities of loss from 10% to zero than they do from (say) 50% to 40%. The other is with the Easterlin paradox; happiness is much flatter over time than are incomes or political freedoms (pdf). What we have in all these cases are moods being more stable than underlying stimuli: attitudes to risk, happiness or outrage.

Why? There are many reasons why we might over-react to small slights, such as a sense of personal insult, umbrage at the violation of a social norm, or the desire to grab attention. There are also reasons to under-react. One is cognitive; people don’t make connections between social phenomena and so don’t link arid Budget speeches to Brexit or to deaths. The other is a psychological coping mechanism whereby we distance ourselves from horrors. Stalin expressed an uncomfortable truth when he said that one death is a tragedy but a million is a statistic.

There is, however, a problem here. It’s that of the boy crying wolf. If you are always complaining, nobody will take you seriously when you have a genuine grievance. The more noise you make, the less signal there is: if you make a fuss about a Labour leader eating a bacon sandwich, people won’t take you seriously when you make graver allegations. Which might, I suspect, help explain why opinion polls don’t change much from week to week: inattentive voters zone out from partisan complaints even if they might be warranted.

* Yes, one is ridicule and the other is offence, But both are negative affect, expressed with the intention of weakening your opponent. 

Comments

[z]

Very well put, do you mind if I share it?

[Nicholas]

Dan Hodge would do well to open his eye to this reality

[Martin S]

Do you think these allegations against Corbyn are false?

The sources you link to suggest not, don’t they?

[ltr]

I am American, but the ceaseless anti-Semitism charges against Jeremy Corbyn are both completely false and threatening to British democracy. That this does not appear to be more broadly and properly understood is shocking.

Talk about foreign influence on an election, the attacks on Corbyn are definitively foreign influence and dangerous.

[e]

@ Martin S I agree. The link's author seems to be saying Corbyn is guilty of being a long time social justice campaigner - an unlikely successful politician - and rigorous scrutiny of his aims and objectives is only right and proper. Yet, as the author also suggests when he demands answers “about current atrocities” this isn't what our forth estate provides.

[fledermaus]

The Corbyn charge would be more convincing if there actually were Munich terrorists buried at the cemetery. Unfortunately there are none.

[Dipper]

A thing I used to tell my junior managers is that little things matter a lot. Big things - failure of a strategy, for instance, can be explained away as due to eternal factors. But little things, like not getting holiday cover sorted properly, or being late with weekly updates, have no other explanation than lax management. And so it is with politics.

Linking Johnson's speech to incidents against Muslim women is dangerous stuff. Are you suggesting we should put gagging orders on certain people and ideas not because what they say is illegal but others over whom they have no control may act in some violent way? Who are you holding accountable for the rise in anti-semitic acts? https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/feb/01/antisemitic-incidents-in-uk-at-all-time-high

And what's all this defence of Corbyn stuff? The man collects terrorist memorials they way trainspotters collect train numbers. You don't have to make keep excuses for someone who is just a pathological terrorist groupie, you can just instead support someone else.

[Emma]

Hmm, this is dumb. Really, really dumb. The complex, catastrophic failures of political policies aren’t even close to being comparable to an excrescence of racism from a powerful public figure. You’re comparing monetary policy to Islamophobia, and wondering why people don’t treat them the same way?

This is, by the way, the same argument Trumpthings like to use against American progressives — that the thousand tiny cuts inherent in retaining one’s identity as a brainless suburban honky despite deep historical challenge are a suitable excuse for support of fascism. “Well okay, yes, large numbers of Americans are vile, dangerous bigots… But they’re poor! Sort of! People laugh at them because they can’t spell, and because they post Jesus memes on Facebook! These tragic victims of neoliberal policy can’t help but become Nazis, and it’s all you libtards’ fault!” Give me a break, man. It’s not “large offenses” versus “small offenses,” but weather versus climate. You don’t prepare for a Category 5 hurricane by thinking long thoughts about carbon emissions.

@Dipper:
>> Who are you holding accountable for the rise in anti-semitic acts?
Anti-semites, probably.

[Dipper]

This burqa business. Some white men in the USA also like to keep their faces hidden. They wear large white smocks with white pointed hoods and small eye holes. When they wear these garments, no-one says "oh, some people exercising their right to keep their faces hidden". They say "oh look, the racist and violent KKK are on the march".

I don't see many women keeping their faces covered by wearing normal garb with a patterned floral veil. I see women in a distinctive style of black clothing that is generally associated with fundamentalist Islamic states which impose violent punishments including beheadings on people who they don't like.

If with my suit I wore a bowler hat and an attractive orange sash, I wouldn't think it unreasonable for people to conclude I was a member of The Orange Order. For me to say, well I just like a bowler hat and a bit of colour, would be completely disingenuous.

So I think it reasonable to say that women who choose to wear an outfit that is clearly associate with a fundamentalist and oppressive form of Islam are wearing an outfit that is going to offend some people, and those people have a right to be offended by it.

[Dipper]

@ Emma - so that would be large sections of The Labour Party then.

[Scratch]

"These tragic victims of neoliberal policy can’t help but become Nazis, and it’s all you libtards’ fault!”

They couldn't become Nazis if they tried. Fascism is always and everywhere a bourgeois (feat:lumpenproletariat) disease.

Tellingly I think, this is the same cross-class coalition powering contemporary bourgeois liberalism - one might further note they also have replaced social and historical criteria with biological and zoological standards so as thus to free itself from any and all restrictions in the struggle for capitalist property.*. Correctly they've identified the revolutionary class at large as well as echt socialists as the exclusive threat to their class privilege.

So anyway, that's why Bubba is better than you.

*Lifted from Trotsky.

[Alex]

"Are you suggesting we should put gagging orders on certain people and ideas not because what they say is illegal but others over whom they have no control may act in some violent way?"

No, if he was suggesting that he'd probably say "We should put gagging orders..." or something like that. I think he's suggesting that we should think before we speak and take some responsibility for the consequences of our actions, and perhaps this comment might be an example!

[Dipper]

@ Alex "take some responsibility for the consequences of our actions" the problem is he's being asked to take responsibility for the actions of others.

[BobbySmith]

Sorry, but western civilization is a semitic creation. First Philosophical, then actual material with the coming of the Ashkenazi and the banking creation of modern capitalism(with the Ashkenazi defeating the Knights, but that is another post for another time). Trotsky knew this more than anyone and why he was scared like shit if it fell, couldn't wait to get back to the States. He never really wanted change like the Russian Mongols in central asia, who were the true inspiration behind the Bolshevik revolution. Once they got their leader who would do their bidding(Stalin) in violence, they went to work.

I never considered the Nazi's true fascists, especially by the late 30's. It had turned into a full blown movement to destroy Western Civilization and Socialists actually respect that. You know you do. Carlyle,Owen,Fornier and Proudin, the 4 founders of socialism's strains, would have all had a bit of proudness in them with the Nazi attempt(as George Bernard Shaw did).

Fascism is a semitic response to your own failures. Conservatism, whether neo or paleo all start from the same semitic source and are financed by the same group of people. Follow the money and let yourself find where the rainbow ends.