The Madness of King George

Think metaphor, not the movie. King George is us, our political selves. With that in mind, Jonathan Chait, an editor at the New Republic, notes that "polls have shown that the public trusts President Obama and Congressional Democrats more than Congressional Republicans. Yet the public is prepared to give the Republicans a huge victory. Why?"

Why, indeed. Talking to psychologists (yes, it has come to that), Slate's Shankar Vedantum learned it's something called "action bias":

When we are stuck in a bad place, whether that bad place is a marriage, a traffic jam, or a weak economy, it is very tempting to try something new. Psychologists call this the action bias—and it turns out to have surprisingly broad ramifications.

When a company starts losing money, or a whole industry starts losing ground because of a new technology, most of us follow leaders who call for revolutionary change—even if no one really knows what change is needed. Leaders who advocate the status quo look like dinosaurs.

Why do we habitually choose action over inaction when things are bad? The intuitive answer is that action promises to get us out of the mess we're in. But that intuition turns out to be wrong. The action bias is driven less by the fear of failure than by the fear of regret.

Crazy times. To quote one of the characters in The Madness of King George, "One may produce a copious, regular evacuation every day of the week and still be a stranger to reason." Yes, quite.