Since 2016, a bizarre sequence of events has challenged our belief in political rationality. First, populism (chiefly, the votes for Brexit and Donald Trump), then the pandemic and now Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine have uncovered previously concealed strains of fallacious thinking. People keep acting apparently against their own self-interest, from Brexit voters making themselves poorer to antivaxxers risking death, to the Russian state destroying the wellbeing of its citizens.
Indeed, perhaps the emblematic politician of our time, Trump, displays an unmatched understanding of human irrationality, as if he’d absorbed the entire corpus of behavioural economics. Meanwhile, opponents of these movements, like me, keep failing to foresee their next illogical choices. Here I’ve tried to identify the biggest irrationalities on both sides.
The first is the self-interest fallacy: the notion that people will always choose their own economic advantage. From Karl Marx until 2016, it was widely believed that “it’s the economy, stupid” — an analytical error that I kept making. Almost the only argument of the Remain campaign ahead of Britain’s referendum was that Brexit would make the country poorer.
But post-referendum research by academics Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin showed that most Leavers cared more “about perceived threats to their identity and national group”. I’ve finally grasped that when people have to choose between their status, their income or life itself, many choose status, suggesting Russia’s elite might prefer European war to status-destroying retreat.
Next up is the set of fallacies around expertise. It’s become apparent that many people don’t understand how it works, and demand a certainty and precision that expertise generally cannot offer. Experts aren’t always right. They are merely wrong less often than non-experts. Yet people still dismiss expertise by pointing to one expert’s error.
Something else that’s poorly understood: expertise advances over time. Our understanding of Covid-19 changes as experts learn more. Lastly: experts are better at explaining what happened than at making predictions. So we know more about the mechanics of climate change than its future path.
When asked for predictions, experts prefer to lay out a set of possible scenarios. But this is too wishy-washy for some people. You see the demand for certainty in arguments about vaccine safety or nuclear energy. The way to think about these issues is by assessing relative risk: taking a Covid vaccine poses a tiny risk, massively outweighed by the benefits. Similarly, future risks from nuclear energy are probably outweighed by the present dangers of climate change. But relative risks seem hard to grasp.
Of course, many people oppose experts for status reasons: experts may know things, but they are arrogant. A popular alternative to expertise is “simplism”: the belief that complex problems have simple answers. Simplists cannot accept that some explanations may be true and yet too complex for laypeople to understand. They prefer to blame, say, bad elites rather than intractable societal causes. Simplists stick to their views come what may, as per the Brexiter refusal to admit that Brexit has failed.
Simplists like conspiracy theories. Any event can be explained in a satisfyingly simple manner by blaming it on a person or group who might conceivably benefit from it, from a witch 400 years ago to George Soros today. There’s a touching faith in the power of elite evildoers to co-ordinate impossibly involved conspiracies.
Then there’s partisanship. As Steven Pinker argues in his recent book , most people don’t want to be rational: they just want their side to win the argument. When they try to understand the world, their first question is: who do I support?
In choosing their side, some people reward norm-breaking — from unbrushed hair to bald-faced criminality — which they equate with authenticity.
And people back the politicians who tell entertaining stories. This valuing of words over good government also pervades the American left, which sometimes obsesses more about insensitive speech than about discriminatory social structures.
When people assess characters outside their own society — Putin, say — they often use the principle of “my enemy’s enemy”. Many western rightwingers liked Putin because he opposed their enemies: feminists, gay people and Hillary Clinton. Sometimes, though, your enemy’s enemy is just a war criminal.
When political leaders get attacked, partisans respond with whataboutism. So any criticism of Trump prompts a takedown of Joe Biden. But whataboutism rests on the “two wrongs make a right” fallacy. It’s also usually incommensurate in degree: Trump and Biden are both flawed, as is everything else, but one of them could destroy US democracy whereas the other is merely a mediocrity.
There: now that I’ve explained irrationality, people will surely ditch it.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2022
