Crime and politics

Running for re-election can be hard on a politician. Care must be taken when choosing between issues to embrace and ignore. Commit to an unattainable goal, and chances of re-election can plummet. Luckily, human nature provides some tailor-made issues into which the politician can sink his or her teeth. Crime is one such issue. Although violent crime statistics have shown a general decline in the past few years, the public is more frightened than ever (USA Today, 1995). Therefore, the politician looking for a platform that resonates with the public could choose to "get tough on crime." Due to people's use of the availability and representativeness heuristics in their judgments about crime, the politician would be able to speak to people's fears. This paper will introduce these heuristics, and then explore how the politician can manipulate them to produce a campaign platform that the public will value.

Tversky and Kahneman state that individuals use the availability heuristic to "assess the frequency of a class or the probability of an event by the ease with which instances or occurrences can be brought to mind." (Plous, 1993) Kanouse and Hanson (1971) suggest that extreme events are more memorable than common events because they differ from normative experience. The media's continuous coverage of violent crime assures that the public will be able to easily bring these extreme events to mind, and therefore to overestimate the prevalence of occurrence.

Added to this misperception is the effect of the representativeness heuristic. Tversky and Kahneman define the representativeness heuristic as the degree to which people consider A to be representative of B (Plous, 1993). In this case, A is the media's "over-coverage" of violent crime. The term "over-coverage" is used because media reports of violent crime far exceed the base rate of violent crime incident per unit of population (USA Today, 1995). However, lacking other sources of information, this over-coverage is assumed by many people to be representative of the amount of crime on the streets.

The politician, then, can take advantage of the way the public makes judgments about crime. He or she could make fiery speeches about getting the "bad guy" off the streets for good. The media covers the bad guy's actions constantly, so people will easily relate to this issue. In order to heighten the need for tough and swift legislative action, the politician could resort to gruesome, and therefore memorable, anecdotes about violent crime. The politician would finish the speeches can by declaring that he or she is the only candidate that takes the public's concerns seriously, and re-election will insure strong new laws that will make the streets safe for the common citizen.

While nothing in this politician's platform is false, it would be misleading and manipulative. This is because he or she would be deliberately taking advantage of people's use of heuristics to make judgments concerning events about which they have limited or skewed information. The politician wants to get re-elected, however, and can be expected to use the techniques available to him or her. One should therefore arm oneself against these techniques. A solution to this is to become educated on the issues of the campaign. Concerning the present example, a citizen could actually look up the amount of local violent crime per population unit. This would put the individual in the position of deciding for him- or herself whether the politician's stance on this issue was worth a vote.

References

Kanouse, D. E., & Hanson, L. R., Jr. (1971). Negativity in evaluations. In E. E. Jones et al. (Eds.), Attribution: Perceiving the causes of behavior. Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press.

Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185, 1124-1130.

USA Today (1995) July 17, Sec A, page 1, column 12.