Emphasis mine:
We’ve known since the work of Richard Downs in 1955 that people can be rationally ignorant about politics. We also know they can be rationallyinattentive. So why can’t they also be rationally irrational in politics?
All this poses the question: what can be done about this? The answer isn’t to dismiss people as stupid. The point about the cognitive biases programme is that it shows that we are all prone to error. In fact, this is true of those of us who are awake to such biases. Once you start looking for such biases, you see them everywhere – and perhaps exaggerate their significance. That’s an example of the confirmation bias.
Instead, we should think about policies that run with the grain of people’s biases and yet are sensible themselves. One clue here lies in that word “control”. What we saw during the EU referendum is that people want control. We should therefore offer voters just this. And meaningful control, not just immigration controls.
I’ll leave others to think about what such a platform might be: for me, it includes a citizens income and worker democracy among other things. The point, though, is that whilst we hear much about inequalities of income, the left must also think about reducing inequalities of power.