We can choose to age in two ways—forward or backward (tumanda ng paurong).   I suffered from the risk of retrogressing in my senior years. The common symptoms are intolerance, moral ascendancy, and narrow-mindedness. In the 2016 Presidential elections, I presumed that voters are rational thinkers, i.e., they weigh the costs and benefits and choose the option that will give them the greatest reward. Thus, when Rappler invited me to analyze how the candidates performed during the Presidential debates, I was analytical and logical. I failed to consider that emotions are a dominant driver in making choices, particularly during elections.

In explaining the results of the recent surveys, an analyst aptly explained that voters make their choices based on “hope” and ”fantasies” conveyed by candidates. These messages may not be realistic or rational.   But people latch on to fantasies. We like stories that end with “happily ever after” instead of being taken on a painstaking process of how to get to the end.   Voters chose the now President Duterte due to his promise to end the drug war in three days. Not many people shared my belief that this was mission impossible and that the candidate should lay down the processes of how the drug problem can be solved in such a short time.   Thinking is a difficult process. Very few people would prefer to go through a painful process of thinking through the steps one by one.

By some miracle of heaven, I have become more “mature” and open-minded and graciously accept that people think differently. Perhaps this is due to the ageing process and my immersion in different communities with different political colors and cultures. I no longer take their choices which are different from mine, as a personal affront. I have become more interested in learning heuristics—i.e., people can take shortcuts in decision-making. They are influenced by heuristic clues such as attractiveness, likeability, and simplicity instead of quality. Voters’ choices can be made based on pity for a candidate—this is not a fallacy, but was borne by a scientific study.   Decisions are influenced by “affect heuristics,” which are feelings that a person or an issue evokes. We are guilty when we come to the defense of a friend because of our emotional attachment. The emotion can be stronger than the facts.

Heuristics take different forms. There is the “ideology heuristics” which can influence a person to take the side of an issue based on what he believes in. This explains the tendency of voters to reject a candidate because he/she believes in opening the economy to foreign investments. All the other platforms of a candidate are disregarded except his/her stand on an ideology. For example, some Catholics in the United States did not vote for a Catholic candidate, President Biden, because of his stand on abortion, on gay rights.

Our influence on decision-makers will be stronger if we consider that people are only capable of considering limited information in making choices.    In some instances, only one factor can break the camel’s back. We will lose if we try to discuss every issue and win every argument. 

We can make the other mistake of thinking that voters are “ignorant” and only base their decisions on personalities and money. They are also rational like us, except that the factors that they consider important are different from ours.

We can only look inwardly and improve on how we communicate our messages and others can be treated with greater respect.

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