{"id":353,"date":"2016-11-09T15:27:12","date_gmt":"2016-11-09T15:27:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deberker.com\/archy\/?p=353"},"modified":"2021-11-06T16:00:00","modified_gmt":"2021-11-06T16:00:00","slug":"three-reasons-youre-surprised-that-trump-won","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deberker.com\/archy\/three-reasons-youre-surprised-that-trump-won\/","title":{"rendered":"Three reasons you’re surprised that Trump won"},"content":{"rendered":"

Originally published\u00a0on Medium<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

1) People don\u2019t understand probabilities<\/h2>\n

As America headed to the polls,\u00a0high-quality forecasters<\/a>\u00a0gave Trump a 35% chance of victory. Somehow, people misinterpreted this as \u2018Trump is unlikely to win the election\u2019. Something that has a 35% chance of happening is\u00a0not\u00a0<\/em>unlikely<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Kahneman and Tversky showed in 1972<\/a>\u00a0that people are absolutely dreadful at understanding probabilities presented in this manner. It\u2019s much easier to understand probabilities in terms of absolute numbers. Let\u2019s say we have 100 elections. We would expect a candidate who polling suggests has a 35% chance of winning to win in 35 of 100 of them. In 35 out of 100 parallel realities, you woke up this morning to a Trump victory. In 65, it was Clinton. If I were to offer you an operation in which the patient died 35 times out of 100, would you think \u2018well, it\u2019s more LIKELY that I survive\u2019, or would you think \u2018Christ, I don\u2019t fancy that\u2019?<\/p>\n

Something that has a 35% chance of happening is\u00a0not\u00a0<\/em>unlikely<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This kind of misapprehension probably undermined the urgency with which people campaigned on behalf of, and turned out to vote for, Hillary. It may even have predisposed people to cast protest votes for Trump. People thought Trump was very unlikely to win. That\u2019s not what the numbers said.*<\/p>\n

2) Everything\u2019s going to be\u00a0alright.<\/span><\/h2>\n

Even those who really understood what the probability estimates were saying might not have really taken them on board.\u00a0Humans tend to display an optimism bias<\/a>\u200a\u2014\u200awe overestimate the probability good things will happen, and underestimate the probability bad things will. Not only are people biased when guessing the probabilities of good and bad things,\u00a0but they change their beliefs differently in the two cases<\/a>. If I tell you something good is more likely than you thought, that sticks. If I tell you something bad is more likely, you\u2019re much less likely to change your mind.<\/p>\n

So those of us who wanted to believe that a Trump victory was unlikely believed just that.<\/p>\n

3) Somebody else will do\u00a0it.<\/span><\/h2>\n

In 1964, a\u00a0girl named Kitty Genovese was stabbed<\/a>\u00a0on a residential street in NYC. 38 people witnessed the incident from their homes. As lights came on and curtains opened, the attacker fled the scene. Curiously, no doors opened. In fact, nobody even called the police. The attacker, emboldened by the apparent indifference of the neighbourhood, returned 30 minutes later to finish the job.<\/p>\n

Kitty\u2019s case provides the most famous example of the\u00a0\u2018bystander effect\u2019.\u00a0<\/a>People find it\u00a0very easy to do nothing<\/em>\u00a0in situations where something bad is happening. This seems to be a mixture of diffusion of responsibility\u200a\u2014\u200a\u2018if it\u2019s important, somebody else will probably do it\u2019, social modelling\u200a\u2014\u200a\u2018it can\u2019t be that important, nobody else seems bothered\u2019, and audience inhibition\u200a\u2014\u200a\u2018it\u2019d be embarrassing if I got all upset about this and it turned out to be nothing\u2019. All of these might have played a role in the lacklustre turnout for Hillary, and the lukewarm response that her campaign inspired in the people who she needed to enthuse. If you rolled your eyes at somebody\u2019s Facebook post about supporting Hillary or campaigning on her behalf, you\u2019ve probably fallen victim to the bystander effect.<\/p>\n

Thanks for reading. If you have any thoughts on or extensions to the above, pop them in the comments\u00a0below.<\/h3>\n

*Additional confusion was probably caused by the distinction between estimated vote share and probabilities, both of which were frequently presented in a similar manner (percentages between 40 and 60). In terms of vote share, a rock-solid 20% difference is extremely persuasive. If high quality polling had established that Hillary was 60% and Trump 40%, we might have had cause to rest on our laurels. But they didn\u2019t\u200a\u2014\u200athey placed them at 49 and 45%. Which leads to the probability estimates of 65\/35, which is far from reassuring.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Was Donald Trump’s election truly an upset? Some explanations from psychology for why we were more surprised than we ought to have been.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":355,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"hide_page_title":"","_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nThree reasons you're surprised that Trump won - Archy de Berker<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/deberker.com\/archy\/three-reasons-youre-surprised-that-trump-won\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Three reasons you're surprised that Trump won - Archy de Berker\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Was Donald Trump's election truly an upset? 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