when you have a thought, any thought, it falls along a continuum from fluent to disfluent. A fluent thought is one that feels subjectively easy to have.
I wish I had been aware of this concept when I wrote my new e-book on the three-axis model. (I also wish that I had proof-read my survey better. I incorrectly classified the answers to question 6.) A good way to describe my thesis is to suggest that it describes the languages in which progressives, conservatives, and libertarians are fluent. Arguments that are presented in the relevant language are easy to process. It takes more work to process thoughts that are not expressed in one’s preferred language.
Later in the talk, Alter says
People get to the point where they’re absolutely sure about one candidate. The candidate represents exactly what they want and what they hoped for, but when you press them, they actually have no idea, and they end up making the decision because the candidate looks more competent—there’s a lot of research showing that—or the candidate looks more intelligent, or he’s just more likeable, but those features don’t predict policy decisions necessarily, and so they end up making decisions based on the wrong sorts of information.
He speaks of “the illusion of explanatory depth,” meaning that people think they understand something better than they do. This sounds like something I am inclined to think is important.
Also, let me include this sentence:
disfluency leads you to think more deeply, as I mentioned earlier, that it forms a cognitive roadblock, and then you think more deeply, and you work through the information more comprehensively.
Of course, that very last thought is one of the major themes of Kahneman’s behavioral economics tome, Thinking Fast and Slow.
Also perhaps worth connecting to the three axes is Clifford Geertz, Ideology as a Cultural System (http://www.gongfa.com/geertz1.htm), which describes people as reaching for their ideologies to orient them when they experience difficulty in making sense of the world.
“This sounds like something I am inclined to think is important.” This is the funniest thing I’ve read all day! I love the subtlety.
Regarding your last sentence, does this imply that we think more deeply (and presumably more completely) about those things that are outside our “native language”, and thus we (or, at least, those motivated to do so) may understand the implications of non-native ideas more thoroughly than those who hold the idea natively?
I’d want to push more on “but those features don’t predict policy decisions necessarily, and so they end up making decisions based on the wrong sorts of information.”
The average voter is not terribly numerate. They don’t know very much about policy issues. They have policy preferences which are inconsistent, weak enough that framing a question differently produces inconsistency, or based on wrong factual assumptions (like, that foreign aid is a significant part of the federal budget). What would “the right sort of information” to vote on be for that sort of voter?
To the extent that you have solid policy views and the ability to distinguish between candidates on the basis of whether each will do stuff consistent with those views, I accept that you should vote on the basis of that. But that leaves out a lot of voters. They reach for things like impressions of intelligence or competence because they’re not working with a whole lot else.
Given that your book is an e-book, couldn’t you easily fix the survey problem?
If you update the ebook, could we get a discount on the new version if we bought the original?