The influence of Ushuaia on the green vote? Human, All Too Human .... Economy
The CSA has just rejected the request made by Jean-Jack Queyranne elected by the Regional Council of Rhone-Alps, which wanted the issue of our national Nicolas Hulot, Ushuaia, to be broadcast tonight, is postponed until after the first round of regional elections Sunday. This in fact argued that the dissemination of this issue could have an influence on voters, catastrophism hulotien well known the miseries of the world urging them to vote Green in mass!
More specifically, (I quote
so that everything is clear ), the socialist president of Rhone-Alpes, in fact, believed that the program hosted by Nicolas Hulot argues that
"planet is fragile and vulnerable " and that" such a position " (sic) should call the CSA to order a postponement of distribution. The mail ended Queyranne even dryly:
"I expect the CSA ensures strict the principle of neutrality of the major broadcast media. It is the mission entrusted to you by the legislature. "
What a joke, is not it reader?
Many commentators have indeed laughed at this request, criticizing what rggnnnnntdjuuuu .... to elect who might think that such important decisions that policy choices can be influenced by something as trivial as television, a priori, non-political, rather than just surfing on the register of the emotion the beauty of nature and the frustration that we face from shame, species human, make him suffer ...
Nevertheless, and although I had a similar reaction to the overwhelming majority of commentators (Damn! He takes us for Pavlov's dogs who, by way of saliva caused by red light, environmentalist vote when we see Home or equivalent?), after two minutes of reflection, I concluded that he had perhaps not totally wrong.
Are we merely beings of flesh and blood, windswept emotion and prone to knee-jerk reactions, rather far from the choice behavior rational as supposed by most economists?
At the risk of disappointing you, reader, and take away some of your illusions about free will, well yes .... At least is there enough scientific evidence to say that.
After all, that our choices are perhaps not as rational as that, and are likely to be influenced by dimensions anecdotal and irrelevant a priori is the essence of what one does when one makes behavioral economics, and especially experimental economics ...
In fact, empirical evidence highlighted by the experimentalists will completely or almost in the sense that this elected official said. We are mostly toys with our emotions and we mainly react with anything other than our cold reason, even for choices that were as cold and rational that the financial choices. This is one of the main contributions of neuroeconomics.
The phenomenon is to cause a change in mood lasting enough to bring a topic to change its choice is called the induction of mood ("mood induction" in English). It is a technique for handling emotions often used in laboratories (for those who want more details, see
Glimcher et al. 2009 (eds), Neuroeconomics ).
This technique is frequently used by psychologists, including assessing the impact of emotions on the political choices of voters, a job very representative of this idea is for example the article by L and V. Isbell Ottati in 2002 on the voting
emotional ("emotional vote").
While experimental economics has not to my knowledge interested in the phenomenon of induced mood on choice voting policy, a paper well known for
Kirschteiger et al., 2006 was focused on the role of this phenomenon on the cooperation between two individuals.
These authors realized an experiment in which each pair of participants plays a gift-exchange game. I already explained this game
here but I can recall the principle of two words. In this game, a participant must decide to set a transfer of a sum of money which was handed to the customer 2. This participant 2, after receiving the transfer of a participant must choose a level of costly effort that will allow him to more or less value to this transfer. Indeed, the effort level chosen by the customer 2 will then determine the gain of one participant who will win, for simplicity, the difference between effort level chosen by the customer 2 and the amount he has transferred the beginning of the game In this game, the Nash equilibrium under perfect game, if we assume that the game is repeated only once ( "one-shot game") is that the customer 2 selects the level of effort the lowest possible (zero if possible). Anticipating this, the participant should provide a level of pay also the lowest possible. This is a social dilemma, since the structure of the game implies that it would be better for both players to reach a level of cooperation involving a larger transfer to the top of the game
Number of experiments observed that, unlike the theoretical prediction following the Nash equilibrium under perfect game, the level of transfer was quite important and, in return, the effort level chosen was far from the minimum.
The originality of the study Kirschteiger et al., 2006 is as follows. Before playing the game gift exchange each pair of participants, they watch two participants (those who must choose the level of effort in response to the transfer) a sequence of a film, one outcome of "the list Chindler of "Spielberg and other participants a scene from a Chaplin film" The lights of the city. "The first scene is a pretty terrible scene in the Warsaw Ghetto, the second scene is a comic scene in laquelleCharlot engages in a hilarious boxing match, each scene for 5 minutes. Each sequence is supposed to induce a state positive affect in the second case and negative in the first. Then, after participants watched 2 have each a sequence (two treatments), they must make a deferral on their emotional state after the viewing, then play the gift exchange game.
Their results are quite spectacular. In treating "bad mood" (2 participants saw the dramatic scene), the level of effort chosen is much higher than that average in the treatment chosen "good mood" (the scene funny boxing) .. Obviously, the behavior of a participant, who saw no stage did not differ among treatments. On average, knowing that the effort level chosen by the customer 2 can vary from 0.1 to 1, in treating "bad mood", the effort level chosen was 0.32 against 0.28 in the treatment "good mood", the difference being statistically significant.
One explanation proposed by the authors is that when a member is undergoing treatment good mood, he seeks to stay in this mindset, but this leads him to have a level of reciprocity vis-à-vis the less important one. Conversely, a participant who is undergoing treatment "bad mood" seeks him out of this bad state of mind at all costs, which explains the high level of cooperation in this treatment.
One of my colleagues, Emmanuel Petit
, recently observed similar results in an ultimatum game subject to manipulation of the emotional state of participants with film clips .
In conclusion, it should probably be wary of an attitude that would to underestimate the role of emotions in rational choices that were made within a framework of clear incentives. It seems that already during the 2002 presidential, reports on the role of insecurity in France and the discourse on this theme has been implicated to explain the defeat of the PS in the first round.
Regarding Ushuaia Queyranne and demand, we must again try to go against common sense and realize that the impact of the emotional factor is far from negligible even after long time .. .
