ScholarlyCommons

Title

Coping With Trade-Offs: Psychological Constraints and Political Implications

Author(s)

Philip E. Tetlock, University of Pennsylvania
Arthur Lupia, University of California - San Diego
Mathew D. McCubbins, University of California - San Diego
Samuel L. Popkin, University of California - San Diego

Document Type

Book Chapter

Date of this Version

2000

Publication Source

Elements of Reason: Cognition, Choice, and the Bounds of Rationality

Start Page

239

Last Page

263

DOI

10.1017/CBO9780511805813.011

Abstract

A thoughtful reader of the psychological literature on judgment and choice might easily walk away with the impression that people are flat-out incapable of reasoning their way through value trade-offs (Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky 1982). Trade-offs are just too cognitively complex, emotionally stressful, and socially awkward for people to manage them effectively, to avoid entanglement in Tverskian paradoxes, such as intransitivities within choice tasks and preference reversals across choice tasks. But what looks impossible from certain psychological points of view looks utterly unproblematic from a microeconomic perspective. Of course, people can engage in trade-off reasoning. They do it all the time – every time they stroll down the aisle of the supermarket or cast a vote or opt in or out of a marriage (Becker 1981). We expect competent, self-supporting citizens of free market societies to know that they can't always get what they want and to make appropriate adjustments. Trade-off reasoning should be so pervasive and so well rehearsed as to be virtually automatic for the vast majority of the non-institutionalized population.

We could just leave it there in a post-positivist spirit of live-and-let-live pluralism. The disciplinary divergence provides just another illustration of how competing theoretical discourses construct reality in their own image. This “resolution” is, however, less than helpful to political scientists who borrow from cognitive psychology or microeconomics in crafting theories of political reasoning. The theoretical choice reduces to a matter of taste, in effect, an unconditional surrender to solipsism.

Copyright/Permission Statement

This material has been published in Elements of Reason: Cognition, Choice, and the Bounds of Rationality edited by Arthur Lupia, Mathew D. McCubbins & Samuel L. Popkin. This version is free to view and download for personal use only. Not for re-distribution, re-sale or use in derivative works. © Cambridge University Press.

Recommended Citation

Tetlock, P.E. (2000). Coping With Trade-Offs: Psychological Constraints and Political Implications. In A. Lupia, M.D. McCubbins & S.L. Popkin (Eds.), Elements of Reason: Cognition, Choice, and the Bounds of Rationality (pp. 239-263). New York: Cambridge University Press. [doi: 10.1017/CBO9780511805813.011]