Do Citizens Simply Follow the Crowd at Election Time?
One of the many cues that citizens have available to them is information from polls. For example, in political contexts, citizens may learn that 59% of voters favor the Democratic candidate and that 41% of voters favor the Republican candidate. Similarly, in economic contexts, citizens are bombarded with advertisements stating that 3 out of 4 dentists recommend a particular brand of toothpaste, that 9 out of 10 consumers prefer a particular beverage, etc. Given the plethora of polls that both candidates and companies conduct and given the widespread dissemination of the results of those polls, it is important to ask 1) whether and under what conditions citizens use polls as substitutes for detailed knowledge about particular candidates or products and 2) whether and under what conditions polls help citizens to improve their decisions. McCubbins and his coauthors address both of these questions by using laboratory experiments. Specifically, we polled 66 UCSD undergraduates about what th
