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Each of us is an outlier in our professions. An economist who votes, like Hamilton, is rare. Wearing an "I voted" sticker into an economics department is like saying "I just threw away $50," since most economists view voting as a wasted investment rather than an act of consumption. A political scientist who teaches American politics but does not vote, like de Marchi, is also rare. The question we starting asking ourselves was, why were two people who spend their working lives studying the mechanics and details of politics so different in what they actually choose to do in politics. In discussing how we each approached elections, it became clear that Hamilton views politics as a fan who takes every opportunity to participate as a partisan. He leads the life of a stereotypical academic, always showing up at the polls and never voting Republican. His car choices are consistent with an Al Gore fan (e.g., once drove a Volvo, then bought a Subaru, now bikes to work). In contrast, de Marchi views individual political actions as investments to be avoided because they would not pay off. As we talked about how we approached other decisions in life, it became apparent that what we bought and how we shopped also varied in systematic ways. Hamilton is high on altruism (baseball coach, Sunday school teacher), information (reads four papers a day), and loyalty (eats at Subway religiously), and low on risk (avoids the ski slopes, skating rink, and canyon rims on hikes). As we show in the book, these are the marks of a stalwart partisan. In contrast, de Marchi practices mixed martial arts and plays poker with a group of people that come to the table with statistical models of the game (i.e., high on risk and information). He is not particularly loyal to any products, and whenever he makes a significant choice, he spends time looking at what experts say on the issue. For example, he has never test-driven a car. After looking at the reviews of professional drivers, crash test results, and reliability surveys, what could he possibly learn from a test drive? Most decisions are optimization problems, and that's a lot of fun if you enjoy acquiring information. He lives in the middle of nowhere (with correspondingly low property taxes and rotten public schools), but bought a small (second) house in a good school district when his eldest son was ready for kindergarten -- it was cheaper than moving to a better school district (and paying higher property taxes) or opting for private school. The different ways we approached decisions in voting and consuming sent us back to look at studies in many different disciplines on the approaches people use to make choices. Prior researchers rarely strayed from their own domains - economists wrote about consumers, and political scientists studied voters. Yet it became clear to us that regardless of the type of choice, people need to answer similar questions to make a decision-how much information should they gather, should they look to the decisions of others, could they simply stick with what they'd done before? What people value in outcomes also raises consistent problems: how much should they value things that happen in the future, what risk might be involved, and to what degree (if any) should they care about the impact of their decisions on others? Gradually, we came to see that habits of mind, the ways that people approach problems, affect how people make decisions across many different areas of their lives. We call these ways of approaching decisionmaking a person's TRAITS, which stands for Time, Risk, Altruism, Information, meToo, and Stickiness. So we came upon the TRAITS we highlight as a way to explain the differences in a small sample (of two people). In the end though, if we're successful, what we learn about what people buy and how they shop should also yield insights into the decisions of millions of consumers, neighbors, and voters. The book will also help you understand a sample of one - you, the reader.
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All contents of the site © 2009 Scott de Marchi and James T. Hamilton. |
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