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Is it irrational to favour people with whom you have something important in common?
Imagine the prime minister of your country is not someone you naturally align with: in fact, you’d rather see him or her defeated at the next election. But then you suddenly learn that your PM is a life-long supporter of the same football team that you have been a fan of since you were a kid. What effect does this new knowledge have on you?
This very thing happened to Samuel Salzer, one of my fellow behavioural practitioners and an ardent Tottenham Hotspur fan, who recently learned that the Swedish Social Democratic premier, Stefan Löfven, has also been a Spurs supporter for decades. While before, he didn’t like his prime minister or, at best, felt neutral about him, he reported that he “instantly noticed how [his] image of him changed,” despite knowing that this is “irrelevant”.
Is this fact really as irrelevant as Samuel writes, and is this reaction, as he suggests, a case of irrational behaviour?
Affinity matters
It seems evident that politics is a matter of policies, and of nothing else. A rational voter — even a hypothetical one — will evaluate the different policies each candidate represents, weigh them up and determine which of the candidates is most likely to pursue a…
