Intuitive Politician

Philip E. Tetlock

In 1890, one of psychology’s patron saints, William James (1890/1983), voiced the suspicion that all psychological explanations ultimately rest on functionalist premises. He felt that, whenever you scratch the surface of even the most forbiddingly formal psychological explanation, you discover informal assumptions about the goals that people are consciously or unconsciously trying to accomplish by thinking, feeling, and acting as they do.

Research on judgment and choice is no exception. The starting points for the dominant research programs have been functionalist postulates of one form or another: In the domain of judgment, people are assumed to be intuitive scientists, psychologists, and statisticians who seek causal understanding and predictive leverage and, in the domain of choice, they are assumed to be intuitive economists who seek to maximize subjective expected utility – in each case, of course, within the constraints of bounded rationality. These assumptions profoundly shape empirical work. Key questions become: How well do people size up against professional standards of competence? Do they draw causal inferences in the rigorous fashion that we might expect of real scientists and do they make choices in the analytical manner that we might expect of real economists?

Both research programs have been phenomenally successful, triggering an avalanche of discoveries of when judgment and choice deviate from conventional standards of scientific or economic rationality. It would be curmudgeonly – and, even worse, wrong – to deny that both research programs pass classic philosophy-of-science tests of knowledge advancement, an all-too-rare achievement in the behavioral and social sciences (Meehl, 1990). A small set of explanatory constructs – judgmental heuristics, the framing of outcomes, the psychophysics of gain and loss functions – organizes a vast array of findings and stimulates falsifiable hypotheses that hold up in an impressive array of settings. However, there is no compelling reason to suppose that, just because these dominant research programs have yet to run out of steam, we should be barred from exploring the empirical implications of alternative functionalist metaphors. In certain well-defined contexts it proves illuminating to posit that people function like intuitive politicians striving to create desired impressions on target audiences, intuitive prosecutors communicating their resolve to make harsh dispositional attributions designed to punish violators of social rules (even if the suspected miscreants can invoke plausible denials, justifications, or excuses in their defense), and intuitive theologians rising to the defense of sacred values against secular, especially monetary, encroachments.

The intuitive-politician model treats people as seeking to protect and enhance their social identities in the eyes of the audiences to whom they feel accountable.