:: blame the extended gestation.... ::

:: Wednesday, February 25, 2004 ::

Why we aren't really who we say we are...
The Kerry Cascade - How a '50s psychology experiment can explain the Democratic primaries. By Duncan Watts:

" We think of ourselves as autonomous individuals, each driven by own internal abilities and desires and therefore solely responsible for our own behavior, particularly when it comes to voting. No voter ever admits—even to herself—that she chose Kerry because he won New Hampshire. To acknowledge that our decisions might not, in fact, be ours at all, but instead might be a reflection of what we think everyone else thinks diminishes our sense of individuality. That's why we prefer to invoke other explanations for why we did whatever we did—Kerry supporters might talk about his 'electability,' but they believe the support for him has some other basis, such as foreign-policy experience, than just following the crowd. Even Asch's unwitting subjects—clear victims of manipulation—when interviewed afterwards gave other rationalizations for their decisions, some of them succumbing to what Asch called a 'distortion of perception' in which they perceived the majority as being correct. "

:: Jim Nichols 2/25/2004 08:11:00 PM [+] ::
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