Organizational Behavior

If You Can’t Beat ’Em, Join ’Em

ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN CAIRNS

News media are often criticized for covering presidential campaigns as if they were horse races and for predicting the winner before the polls close in all states. A new study suggests that some voters indeed might be influenced by predictions of who is likely to win. Surprisingly, it is the most partisan voters—not the undecideds—who are most likely to become more favorably disposed toward a leading candidate whom they initially opposed.

In the week immediately preceding the 2000 U.S. presidential election, graduate students Aaron Kay and Maria Cristina Jimenez polled 288 people in the San Francisco Bay Area in collaboration with associate professor of organizational behavior John Jost. They asked people at shopping malls, airports, and on campus to evaluate candidates George Bush and Al Gore after reading a purportedly authoritative analysis of the election’s likely outcome. Some respondents read that experts expected Bush to win by a wide margin, others read he would win narrowly, while still others read predictions of a Gore landslide, narrow victory, or a tie. Participants were then asked to rate the desirability of both Gore and Bush presidencies on a scale of 1 to 9 and also to indicate their own party affiliation.

Overall, the results showed a strong relationship between a candidate’s perceived likelihood of winning and his desirability to voters. That is, both Republicans and Democrats tended to rate Gore as more desirable as the probability of his victory increased and to rate Bush as more desirable as the likelihood of his victory increased. Both candidates also were rated less favorably when they were believed to be losing.

People apparently have a “remarkable tendency to adapt and accommodate to anticipated outcomes, even if those outcomes are not personally good for them,” says Jost, who studies how institutions gain and lose legitimacy and who coedited the book The Psychology of Legitimacy. “This tendency may help to explain why social and political systems are as successful as they are at retaining cooperation and consent and why qualitative social change is so difficult to accomplish,” Jost says.

However, evidence from this field study and a follow-up experiment conducted by the three researchers clarified that not everyone adjusts his or her views to fit the anticipated outcome. The people polled who said they were political independents or from a third party did not increase their evaluations of the likely winner, whether it was Bush or Gore.

In a second study, the researchers asked undergraduates to rate the desirability of either large or small tuition increases or decreases that were perceived as likely or unlikely. Thus, there were eight different conditions in the experiment. Here again, those who learned that a large increase was highly likely were far more likely to rate it as desirable compared with those who thought the large increase was not very likely or with those who were told a much smaller increase was probable. These results prompt Jost to suggest that people only rationalize outcomes in which they are psychologically invested.

“When outcomes are highly consequential and at the same time highly uncertain, people face an interesting psychological dilemma,” he says. “They hope for the best but must also prepare themselves for the worst. As undesirable events are perceived as more likely, people rationalize anticipated outcomes. Events that are perceived as more likely come to be seen as more desirable—as sweet lemons—and those perceived as less likely come to be seen as less desirable—or as sour grapes.”

Nonpartisans probably did not jump on the predicted winner’s bandwagon in the polling experiment, Jost says, “either because they had no strongly preferred candidate or because they knew that their third party candidate had no chance of winning.” Thus, they were not motivationally involved in the outcome of a Bush–Gore contest. Similarly, students facing the likelihood of a small tuition increase did not feel compelled to support it, whereas those facing the likelihood of a large tuition increase did.

When people are highly involved personally, rationalizing an unwanted outcome may make it easier for them to cope, Jost says. But this tendency “has significant implications for the stability and functioning of social and political systems.” Could democracy survive if proponents of losing candidates refused or were unable to see any positive characteristics in the elected leader?

“When pre-election poll results are published,” says Jost, “it most likely stimulates processes of adaptation and accommodation. It may be that democratic institutions work well to the extent that people are able and motivated to rationalize electoral outcomes, especially those outcomes that might have initially seemed unattractive.”

—KATHLEEN O'TOOLE

Sour Grapes, Sweet Lemons, and the Anticipatory Rationalization of the Status Quo, Aaron Kay, Maria Cristina Jimenez, and John T. Jost, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming 

The Psychology of Legitimacy, John Jost and Brenda Major (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001