The consistency illusion

The British Social Attitudes survey reports a fall in the proportion of people saying they voted Leave in the 2016 referendum and a rise in the numbers saying they didn’t vote. This is probably due to panel attrition. But it draws our attention to what is certainly a real phenomenon – a tendency to misremember our past preferences in a systematic way.

This was pointed out (pdf) by Gregory Markus back in 1986. He showed that when people were asked about their views on political issues such as gender equality or drug legalization nine years earlier their recall was poor. Their beliefs as they remembered them was much closer to their current ones than was in fact the case. They understated the extent to which they had changed their mind.

What was going on here is a desire for consistency. We want to believe that we are the captains of our soul rather than just a bundle of neurons responding erratically to stimuli and we redescribe our past to make it easier to believe this. There is a line in a lovely Kate Campbell song about a woman who “convinced herself she never needed a man”. And when Orwell has the Ministry of Truth claiming that we have " always been at war with Eastasia" he is highlighting the public's willingness to change their perception of history to maintain their self-image of consistency. Giuliana Mazzoni says such false recall is common:

Picking and choosing memories is actually the norm, guided by self-enhancing biases that lead us to rewrite our past so it resembles what we feel and believe now. Inaccurate memories and narratives are necessary, resulting from the need to maintain a positive, up-to-date sense of self.

This echoes Adam Smith:

The opinion which we entertain of our own character depends entirely on our judgments concerning our past conduct. It is so disagreeable to think ill of ourselves, that we often purposely turn away our view from those circumstances which might render that judgment unfavourable.

But we don’t just misremember the past to maintain a stable self-image. We also reinterpret the present to avoid telling ourselves we were wrong. Psychologists call this choice-supportive bias. If we buy a car that’s slower than we wanted, for example, we congratulate ourselves on its fuel efficiency. Disappointed lovers or voters want to believe they were betrayed rather than that they made the wrong choice. And Brexiters downplay economics and focus on the benefits of sovereignty and need to respect the will of the people. As Robert Cialdini wrote:

Once we have made a choice or taken a stand, we will encounter personal or interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment. (Influence, p57)

This is one reason we are prone to the sunk cost fallacy: having made a bad choice, we stick with it.

Such self-deception devices mean, as Daniel Kahneman has noted (pdf), that our remembered utilities don’t accord with what we experienced at the time. But it’s memory rather than reality that shapes our choices. And this, he says, means we have “poor accuracy” in predicting what we’ll want in future.

Here again, our attitudes are shaped by an urge for consistency. Just as we wrongly think that our past preferences are like our present ones, so too do we over-estimate the extent to which our future preferences will resemble our present ones. Matthew Rabin call this the projection bias (pdf): we project our current tastes into the future. This is why people pay too much for houses with swimming pools or convertible cars in the summer: they fail to anticipate these will be little use in the winter. It might also explain the well-known tendency for share prices to be too high in the spring and too low in the autumn: investors wrongly project their springtime optimism and their autumnal pessimism into the future. (And fund managers have always been loath to recognise this because they want to see themselves as consistent rational people rather than skittish mood-driven flibbertigibbets.)

All this suggests that we do not have the stable preferences we think we do. Stability and consistency are to some extent illusions which we impose onto our memories, perceptions and expectations. Which poses a question. If an individual’s preferences are unstable to a greater degree than we think can we really speak of a stable “will of the people”? Maybe this is an emergent phenomenon – something that’s true of groups but not of the individuals that compose the group. Or maybe it’s just a fiction.

Comments

[Dave Timoney]

The danger with thinking of the will of the people as emergent is it becomes a quasi-mystical entity, which opens the door to the usual suspects presenting themselves as its unique avatar. But that doesn't make it a "fiction", any more than an election result can be dismissed in the same way. What would be a fiction is "the settled will of the people".

[Bob]

Chris, this is unrelated but what is your view on George Soros for Secretary of State who supports ending war on terror and has anti-Saudi and anti-Isreali. For the "establishment people" maybe try and tie him to the Bernie Sanders.

[Dipper]

Yes.

The infinity Puzzle by Frank Close, although principally about the history of Particle physics, is also about mis-remembering things and people unable to remember who did what when.

I always make a mental note of how I'd vote on big decisions. So wasfor Iraq War because if your PM says you face an imminent threat from another country you have to go with him. So I got that wrong. And I'd have voted fro the deal on MV2, and would do next time too, even though I think it is a rubbish deal.

And investing money is a good idea. No better way of seeing how difficult it is to predict the future than unexpected losses (and gains).

[D]

They probably didn't vote and are being honest now.

[Peach]

Dont forget forgetfulness. On top of that, views change marginally over short periods of time but massively over long periods of time. Maybe our experience of the long run as a series of short runs gives us the false impression that our views are stable.

[Robert Mitchell]

"If an individual’s preferences are unstable to a greater degree than we think can we really speak of a stable “will of the people”?"

I thought you were going to question efficient price discovery, because don't the theorems start with an assumption of consistent and transitive preference relations?

If we aren't consistent, aren't market prices arbitrary?

Also can't you hedge market movements with volatility derivatives, for example?

[georgesdelatour]

Applying economic concepts like the “sunk cost fallacy” to political disputes misses the point.

The year is 1869 and you’re analysing Polish uprisings against Russian rule. It seems like a classic case of sunk costs for the rebels. They lose the Kościuszko Uprising of 1794, the November Uprising of 1831, the Revolution of 1848 and the January Uprising of 1863. They always lose. There’s no way they’re ever going to overwhelm the Russian steamroller. Why don’t they just give up and reconcile themselves to Russian (and German and Austrian) rule?

50 years later an independent Poland is reborn.

[shoreview]

The leavers are all dying. The ranks of the non-voters are being added to by those who were too young to be allowed to vote in 2016.

[georgesdelatour]

@shoreview

People don’t have their opinion of the EU fixed at birth. The young of 1975 voted for the EEC/EU by an even greater margin than the young of 2016 did. The Remainers of 1975 became Brexiters by 2016 because they changed their minds. Which is just as well; it means a referendum really is different from a census.