An Alternative Metaphor in the Study of Judgment and Choice: People as Politicians

Researchers who study judgment and choice have assumed it is useful to think of people as either intuitive psychologists or economists who strive either to understand the people around them or to maximize subjective expected utility. This article proposes that it is also useful to think of people as intuitive politicians who strive to please the diverse constituencies to whom they feel accountable. The article specifies two hard-core assumptions of a political research program on judgment and choice and a testable middle-range theory (the social contingency model). The article also explores both the descriptive and normative implications of shifting from the psychologist and economist metaphors to the politician metaphor. At a descriptive level, the political research program highlights a variety of social and institutional variables that moderate (either attenuate or exacerbate) response tendencies that have been labelled as errors or biases. At a normative level, the political research program highlights an alternative set of criteria for labelling effects as errors or biases. Response tendencies that look flawed from one metaphorical perspective often look quite reasonable from another. The politician metaphor suggests more normatively generous ways of viewing several effects, including the fundamental attribution error, the dilution effect, ambiguity aversion, the attraction effect and the status quo effect.