Do Some Research, Avoid The Herd Mentality

Great article by Holman Jenkins on "'herd mentality" in the Wall Street Journal. Acquiring information is costly, or lots of hard work, so this leads to people taking shortcuts on forming opinions. Often inaccurate, incomplete or non-sensical shortcuts.
Think Global Warming, Iraq troop withdrawal, and high gasoline prices.

'Availability cascade" is a term coined by Cass Sunstein and Timur Kuran in an important 1999 Stanford Law Review article. Their work follows distinguished prior work on informational cascades (when people knowing little about an issue take their cue from others) and reputational cascades (involving the rational incentive to go along with the crowd). All owe a debt to the Nobel Prize-winning work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who coined the term "availability bias" for people's willingness to judge the odds of a given event occurring based on how readily an example comes to mind.

This hand-washing is the essence of childishness but the political class is far from the helpless sock puppet of an ignorant or misinformed public. The same voters, in any poll, would happily affirm that the world is running out of oil, that the supply is controlled by unreliable foreigners. Yet let gasoline rise to $3.00 a gallon, and suddenly they believe that only the ruthless profiteering of oil companies stands between them and cheap and abundant gasoline.

Read the whole article here.