Intuitive Politics and Why Thinking Isn’t Guaranteed to Save Us

For many people, politics is like sports. Our intuition is to root for our team, even when the players behave poorly. From antiquity to the Enlightenment, philosophers have proposed thought as the best way to govern messy human impulses. Recent research, however, shows that intuitions play a powerful role in political decision-making, and people often use thinking as a way to rationalize their comfortable but counterproductive gut feelings. In this chapter, the authors explain how this human tendency produces undesirable dynamics in modern electoral democracies. The authors then discuss the conditions under which people can use thinking to be more reflective and what implications it has for democracy. They conclude by considering whether the design of democratic institutions can minimize the negative side effects of intuitive politics.