Who is your pick? A girl crossing a bridge over Sungai Pinji in Taman Wah Loong, Kampar, decorated with party flags. Will the party with the prettiest flag win?

Who voters choose, and why, is something that even the voters themselves are not very clear about sometimes.

OBAMA was elected on a platform of “change” in 2008 over Senator John McCain. He promised a world that was a better, safer place, whereas McCain kind of just seemed like more of the same.

However, when you compare the rhetoric in his 2008 campaign with what is happening now – the ongoing hunger strike in the still-not-yet-closed prison in Guantanamo Bay, the escalation of a drone-enabled, remote-controlled war in Pakistan and elsewhere, as well as a stuttering national economy – you have to wonder: was it reasonable for the public to re-elect him?

Voters are fickle creatures, and the reasons why a person votes for one candidate over another, I believe, are rarely rational.

For example, there is a rash of campaign flags planted around the nation right now. But who really believes that voters minds can be changed by the mere sight of a flapping piece of coloured cloth?

More than you think.

Political parties invest a lot in poster campaigns and the like simply because they think it’s important that their message is “out there”. A study on the importance of political posters conducted by the Université de Montréal in Canada discovered that political parties in France and Belgium consider poster campaigning to be crucial.

Parties stated that improving visibility of their presence was very important. It’s like a war that escalates. If one party decides not to put up any posters, they risk the voters only seeing the other side’s and being unduly influenced by them.

Everybody’s mother at some point says something like, “So, if he jumped off a bridge, you must follow also, is it?” We are taught to not just blindly follow the herd. But mothers usually forget how compelling peer pressure is.

The Asch conformity experiments in the 1950s demonstrated this. Subjects were given a very easy test to complete in groups, and at the end, each had to tell their invigilator what their answers were.

Normally, participants would get practically all of the questions right. However, when the rest of the group intentionally give the wrong answers, some subjects began to change their minds and agree with their colleagues instead.

How often did this happen? In 75% of the cases, subjects would answer at least one question wrongly. If this was an election, it would be a landslide.

The study also found that posters for the larger parties tended to portray candidates as having universal values that would appeal to any voter (e.g. that the candidate is “reliable”), and that the most important aspect of posters is to show the face of the candidate – even more than his name or party affiliation.

How a candidate looks should have very little bearing on whether you would vote for him.

Would you vote for somebody just because he was better-looking than his opponent? Our mind says “no”, but that delicate balance of hormones and chemistry that we refer to as “instinct” often overrules it.

For example, we know how tall somebody is should have very little impact on whether they make a good leader or not. Yet, a survey in the US showed that the mean height of CEOs is three inches (7.6cm) taller than the average American male. In fact, you are less likely to be a CEO if you are short, compared to if you were black or female.

The brain uses shortcuts and assumptions to make judgements. We choose to cross a road because the light has turned green, and cars are slowing to a stop. We assume that no car will accelerate towards us while we are walking to the other side.

So you think you are voting because you like one candidate’s policies better. But do you really understand the policy? National public policy is an extremely complicated thing upon which even the experts don’t always fully agree on. In fact, sometimes voters don’t even agree with themselves.

A study by cognitive scientists at Lund University in Sweden made people declare which party they supported and then fill up a questionnaire. The experimenters then surreptitiously swapped the answers for a slightly different ones so that when they scored the answers, the subjects would seem to support a different party.

Only 22% of the respondents realised that the answers had changed.

The best thing a voter can do is to recognise his own fallibility in this matter. Yes, it may be obvious who you want to vote for. But is it obvious for the right reasons? Do you like a candidate because it is based on more practical evidence of past success? Or do you think he looks like a nice guy? Think carefully.

President Obama never discouraged comparisons between him and people like President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. I would think that many of the US public voted for Obama, believing he could be like these past great heroes of theirs.

But I can’t help wondering if a McCain administration would not only have been similar to Obama’s in terms of end results, but also avoided disappointment in delivering on his promises.

Logic is the antithesis of emotion but mathematician-turned-scriptwriter Dzof Azmi’s theory is that people need both to make sense of life’s vagaries and contradictions. Speak to him at star2@thestar.com.my.

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