the citizen-viewer

About a week ago (before Sausage McGraw went on his convention-blogging rampage) the citizen-viewer posted a comparison of two maps of the contiguous United States.

One showed the pre-Civil-war slave vs. free states, the other the incidence of corporal punishment in schools by state:

In that posting, the c-v recalled an old post about the cartogram which maps the US, by population.

Today, we mash up that posting with a recent interview on Talk of the Nation with Robert Cialdini to show how the electoral map is being distorted.

Cialdini is a social psychologist who studies how people make decisions. For example, “the idea that an idea, a concept, a behavior becomes more valid to the extent that it is grounded in the crowd, the wisdom of a crowd.” Cialdini calls this the principle of social proof.

If you want more people to vote, it turns out you shouldn’t tell them that not enough people vote, or that very few people vote. Tell them that lots of people vote, and they’ll want to vote too. We citizen-viewers, we’re sheep.

The principle of social proof is an internal version of the argumentum ad populum, seen here as famously used by RCA Records:

They know marketing. Now take a look at this map from the electoral-vote.com showing the current state of the presidential race. At a glance, who’s getting more support — the ‘reds’ or the ‘blues’?

Every election season brings us similar versions of this map, or geographic cartogram, clearly showing that the country is mostly red. The people have spoken: Get on the red bandwagon.

But how well does this familiar map represent reality?

It happens that there’s a strong correlation between living in a large, thinly populated state and having ‘red’ tendencies. There is any number of reasons for this, one of them presumably that the Republican messages that have been developed over the last decades appeal to rural and Western states more.

If the Republicans adjusted their message for this very reason, it was a smart move.

For one, they’re represented in the Senate more heavily than their voting numbers would suggest. And since each state gets two extra electoral votes corresponding to its Senators, they get a boost in the Electoral College as well. That’s within the rules.

But on top of that, every election year since the above correlation came into effect, the ‘red’ party reaps an unearned benefit from the principle of social proof.

Consciously, the citizen-viewers may know that the electorate is quite evenly divided between red voters and blue voters. But what if they got more of this:

Here the areas of the states are adjusted according to their population (see, it’s a “population cartogram”).

It’s easy to see that the ‘blues’ are, at the moment, attracting more support, at least according the polls. No need to put in the numbers of electoral votes; the relative sizes of the states make that clear. Surprise! Massachusetts has as many electoral votes as Idaho, Wyoming and Utah combined. And quite a few more people too.

Take a look at the very beautifully designed graphic presented by The New York Times.

It’s a visual representation, but the data aren’t represented accurately on a visual level. So when the bandwagons roll by, this map makes the red bandwagon look bigger, and thus more attractive, than it actually is.

So compelling is the impression that more citizen-viewers are ‘red’ that the NYT helpfully includes a kind of tape measure across the top, showing (albeit less compellingly) that it is actually the blues who are leading the polls at the moment.

The nearly universal use of the geographically accurate electoral map amounts to a structural bias that consistently exaggerates the influence of red-tending states and therefore the people in them.

The c-v wonders how much this structural bias has contributed to a minority mentality among the blues.

Year after year the country is shown maps which depict the more densely populated coastal and northern states as smaller, and therefore the views and attitudes of their residents as relatively less popular than they are. The heartland is red and big. The rest is blue and doesn’t even have a name. The heartland is where normal Americans live. And what makes them normal? Well, they are more of them. You can see it on the map.

(By the way, the NYT used to have an option to show the states as a cartogram. If the c-v remembers correctly, the states were shown as sets of equally sized boxes that each represented one electoral vote. It’s gone now; perhaps not enough people clicked on it. But surely they still have the coding.)

The geographic cartogram depicts the states in terms of area, which is nearly irrelevant politically, rather than in terms of population, which is the very basis of our representation in government. The population cartogram, or electoral-vote cartogram, would be a more meaningful way to depict reality and a more accurately representative default view.

After all, acres don’t vote. We Elvis fans do.