[EM] another reason to avoid strategic motivations

[Terry Bouricius]

Jonathan,

Interesting...
But what the study doesn't test is whether the respondents were answering 
"sincerely." ;-)

But seriously, it would be important to extend the experiment to find out 
if the respondents would ACT on that pessimistic statement that flies in 
the face of probability, or if they were making a mildly humorous 
statement as in "I forgot my umbrella, so it will probably rain."

Terry Bouricius

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jonathan Lundell" <jlundell at pobox.com>
To: "Election Methods" <election-methods at electorama.com>
Sent: Monday, December 01, 2008 8:17 PM
Subject: [EM] another reason to avoid strategic motivations


...or at least to avoid methods that encourage strategic voting, is
that voters are so bad at it.

I blogged a rather dismaying study the other day on the subject of
people's tendency to irrationally misjudge probabilities when they
have a stake in the outcome. I wouldn't want to draw too close a
parallel between this and any particular election method. Rather, it's
something to keep in mind when we talk about voters trying to make
strategic calculations that they're not really competent, in general,
to make.

Notice also that there's a systematic bias; it's not just that the
subjects are wrong in a random way that might tend to cancel out.


http://pragmatos.net/2008/11/29/pessimistic-voters/
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