THE publication of Hillary Clinton’s campaign memoir “What Happened” in September set off a new round of finger-pointing over what caused the 2016 presidential election result. Many argued that the Democratic candidate did not accept enough blame for her own defeat. Social psychologists might have something to say about that: most argue that it is a widespread tendency to attribute other people’s misfortune to personality traits rather than to the circumstances they find themselves in; we do the reverse when it comes to our own failures. This “fundamental attribution error” is discussed by Edward Glaeser, an economist at Harvard, and his colleagues in a recent paper that could help explain many political outcomes.
There is no simple objective measure of a politician’s competence. But voters’ perception of competency appears to often be determined by ideology. For example 70% of Democratic voters thought Barack Obama would go down in...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/2zIKpeC
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