In a post a couple of weeks ago, I suggested that any increase in partisan sorting and hostility might be attributable to a “supply side” effect rather than being demand driven; that is, determined by what people can easily signal about themselves as opposed to that signal being inherently valuable. I’ve also previously discussed our dating experiment, where people are willing to trade-off the hotness of a prospective date for them to share political beliefs. It would be interesting if dating sites asked how much people would have been willing to pay for information about their prospective date’s political views. This has great value when all information is costless, but would it still matter more if people had to pay for it? More interestingly, might some people be willing to pay to avoid knowing their date’s politics?
In some of our work on the value of information in relation to calorie labelling, we found that many people are willing to pay not to know calorie information. The context was calorie labelling on popcorn that people were going to consume at the cinema (well, sitting at a computer). We all know popcorn is not the healthiest food around, and so why get reminded of that fact, especially when you’re going to eat it anyway? The coolest part of the study was that we coded the facial expressions of participants when they saw the calorie labels. Their reactions and their willingness to pay to avoid information depended on how health conscious the participants were. Whilst the emotional effects of calorie labelling were short-lived, there might be contexts where “belief labelling” is misery-making into the longer term.
The effects of the labels, and the willingness to pay to know or avoid them, will surely differ according to how much politics matters to people. Those with strong views may assume that everyone cares about politics, but not everyone does. I know a few people who actively stay away from politics. In fact, some of my best friends don’t give a stuff for party politics. They care about some issues and topics, of course, just not party-political ones. To be honest, I find those with strong views on everything to be quite annoying. This may say more about me than them but, regardless, I’ll make this point several times in various ways in my blogs: a well-functioning society has several different types and distributions of people in it.
Once we know what someone believes, it will often affect how we behave towards them, and frequently in ways that are inefficient and/or unfair. Imagine that I have strong views on immigration policy and find out that a work colleague feels the complete opposite to me. I ought to be able to put my strong aversive reaction to their views about immigration to one side when we’re discussing another issue. But if I can’t ignore their beliefs, then I might look less favourably on, say, their views about how productivity could be improved. It’s hard to think of any good reasons why someone’s views on immigration would affect the quality of their beliefs about how to get more output from a given input in the workplace.Equally, I might find out that my colleague shares the same views, and then I find myself agreeing with them about how to improve productivity.
Recent research has explored the influence of beliefism on various aspects of economic behaviour. One study from 2015 focusing on Ghanaian taxi drivers found that they were inclined to accept lower fares from passengers who shared their political affiliation while demanding higher prices from those who supported opposing parties. A study from the US found that when people were given the opportunity to buy a heavily discounted gift card and were informed that the seller shared their political views, they were nearly twice as likely to purchase the gift card at a higher price. These decisions will partly be the result of a conscious choice, but largely the result of an unconscious bias to favour people who have similar beliefs to us.
None of us will be immune from allowing how we feel about one belief that someone holds to spill over to how we feel about other beliefs they hold and about them in general. Since it is much easier for us to split on someone – to decide that they are either all good or all bad – we will often take their views on a single issue as a “thin slice” of their whole character, and this spills over into how we treat that person in general. So, the next time you’re about to rant at someone about your political views, perhaps take a moment to reflect upon whether they want or need to know. Keeping schtum might even help in forming relationships with people – decent, kind, and funny people – who you might not otherwise get to know because you let the cat of your beliefs out of the bag way too soon for you to get to know them.