Third Place Candidates - Do They Help or Hurt the Front-Runners?
April 2nd, 2007
By GARY A. BUTTS
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If you are interested in politics and psychology, as I am, this is for you.
While it has long been known that voters often select candidates that compensate for the perceived weaknesses of the current officeholder, it is now postulated that the top 2 candidates in a race benefit from the presence of a third place candidate.
Here is a piece of the article in the Washington Post:
If Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama ever took a break from fundraising to bone up on psychology, they might realize the need to talk up . . . John Edwards.
The same goes for front-runners John McCain and Rudy Giuliani in the race for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. They ought to be drawing attention to Mitt Romney, or to “Law and Order” star Fred Thompson, who could be running third in the race if he declared.
Front-runners are usually focused on racing each other. They often do not realize that when people cannot decide between two leading candidates — and it doesn’t matter whether we are talking about politicians or consumer appliances — our decision can be subtly swayed by whoever is in third place.
Psychologists call this the decoy effect: In a perfectly rational world, third candidates should only siphon votes away from one or both of the leading contenders. Under no circumstances should they cause the vote share of either front-runner to increase. In the actual world, however, third candidates regularly have the unintended effect of making one of the front-runners look better than before in the minds of undecided voters.
Joel Huber, a Duke University marketing professor, showed how the decoy effect works with restaurants. Huber asked people whether they would prefer to eat at a five-star restaurant that was far away or at a three-star restaurant nearby. As with many choices in life, each restaurant had different advantages. If the better restaurant was also nearby, there would be no dilemma. But the question forced people to compare apples and oranges — trade off quality against convenience — which ensured no automatic answer.
The human brain, however, always seeks simple answers. Enter the third candidate. Huber told some people there was also a choice of a four-star restaurant that was farther away than the five-star option. People now gravitated toward the five-star choice, since it was better and closer than the third candidate. (The three-star restaurant was closer, but not as good as the new candidate.)
Another group was given a different third candidate, a two-star restaurant halfway between the first two. Many people now chose the three-star restaurant, because it beat the new option on convenience and quality. (The five-star restaurant outdid this third candidate on only one measure, quality.)
What the decoy effect basically shows is that when people cannot decide between two front-runners, they use the third candidate as a sort of measuring stick. If one front-runner looks much better than the third candidate, people gravitate toward that front-runner. Third candidates, in other words, can make a complicated decision feel simple.
Fascinating.
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This entry was posted on Monday, April 2nd, 2007 at 6:10 am and is filed under Mitt Romney, John McCain, Elections, Rudy Giuliani, John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Politics. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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