People are not computers

In their article, "The Responsive Voter: Campaign Information and the Dynamics of Candidate Evaluation" Lodge et. al. find strong support for an "on-line model" that suggests that citizens are in fact quite responsive to campaign information (contrary to what the conventional recall model suggests). This model hypothesizes that citizens use information from campaigns to make an evaluation/judgment of issues and then forget the specific facts. Thus they are still able to make sound policy judgments even if they can't recall the information on which their opinion is based.

The idea of a misinformed citizenry, brought up in this weeks readings, casts the on-line processing model in a new light. In "Misinformation and the Currency of Democratic Citizenship", Kuklinski et. al. write that there are three mental processes that affect decision making based on the idea that citizens are constantly trying to make sense of their world.

(1)People do not act simply as passive receivers of stimuli from their environments. Their minds actively decide which information to attend to and how to interpret that information. When they don't have complete information they make inferences.
(2) People strive for consistency
(3) Once people store their factual inferences their inferences are indistinguishable from known facts and data. This causes many people to become over confident about their factual beliefs.

The last mental process Kuklinski et. al. write about is very similar to the idea of on-line processing. People take in facts, formulate opinions, and then forget these facts. However, in Kuklinski et. al.'s model, this process does not allow people to make sound judgments based on accurate and known and then later forgotten facts. Instead, people make inferences and are later unable to distinguish their inferences from actual facts. If you watched the video posted earlier you can see an example of a woman who made an inference based on some type of information (Obama is restricting freedom of speech) believing it to be a fact. When the reporter probed deeper into the issue she couldn't recall information to back up her statement.

I think we should be wary of the use of on-line processing to produce rational policy judgments. People are not computers and cannot be expected to take in information, process it, and be left with a logical evaluation. Rather, we pick and choose what information we want to receive and fill in the blanks using our bias towards striving for consistency in our beliefs. What we are left with is an evaluation that we may believe to be based on fact, but is in fact based on our inferences and human biases.