Coping With Trade-Offs: Psychological Constraints and Political Implications

A thoughtful reader of the psychological literature on judgment and choice might easily walk away with the impression that people are flat-out incapable of reasoning their way through value trade-offs (Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky 1982). Trade-offs are just too cognitively complex, emotionally stressful, and socially awkward for people to manage them effectively, to avoid entanglement in Tverskian paradoxes, such as intransitivities within choice tasks and preference reversals across choice tasks. But what looks impossible from certain psychological points of view looks utterly unproblematic from a microeconomic perspective. Of course, people can engage in trade-off reasoning. They do it all the time – every time they stroll down the aisle of the supermarket or cast a vote or opt in or out of a marriage (Becker 1981). We expect competent, self-supporting citizens of free market societies to know that they can\u27t always get what they want and to make appropriate adjustments. Trade-off reasoning should be so pervasive and so well rehearsed as to be virtually automatic for the vast majority of the non-institutionalized population. We could just leave it there in a post-positivist spirit of live-and-let-live pluralism. The disciplinary divergence provides just another illustration of how competing theoretical discourses construct reality in their own image. This “resolution” is, however, less than helpful to political scientists who borrow from cognitive psychology or microeconomics in crafting theories of political reasoning. The theoretical choice reduces to a matter of taste, in effect, an unconditional surrender to solipsism

Political brands: can parties be distinguished by their online brand personality?

This paper investigates whether or not five English political parties are differentiating themselves based on the brand personality they are communicating through their websites. The relative brand positions of five English political parties are analysed using Aaker’s brand personality scale. The text from each party website is analysed using content analysis and a dictionary-based tool. The results are plotted in relation to one another on a correspondence analysis map. We find that the two main dimensions on which parties' brand personalities differ relate to the trade-offs between communicating Competence and communicating Sincerity, and between communicating Sophistication and communicating Ruggedness. We find that parties' brand personalities are distinctive, with the exception of the Green party, and that the position of one party, the United Kingdom Independence Party, is particularly distinctive. Our research uses Aaker’s existing framework for thinking about brand personalities, rather than creating a new framework for politics. By using an existing framework, we are able to use tools developed in other disciplines, and show their usefulness for the study of political marketing

Regional differences in portion size consumption behaviour: Insights for the global food industry

Abstract: Given the influence of globalization on consumer food behaviour across the world, the purpose of this paper is to contribute to the theoretical discourse around food portion size as a global consumption-related symbol and its underlying socio-economic drivers for food industry strategy. Overall, 25,000 global food consumers were surveyed across 24 countries to elicit insight on portion size consumption behaviour as well as consumer perception on eating and drinking small portion size within selected socio-economic classes. The data was quantitatively analysed to answer the pertinent research objectives. In 20 out of the 24 global markets surveyed, large food portion size was statistically established as a prevalent consumption-related symbol. The paper found that there are regional differences in portion size food consumption behaviour, and further disparities exist across age, gender and income status in 24 countries covering all regions, including Australia, China, Mexico, South Africa, United Kingdom and United States of America. The outlined food industry implications reveal that adaptation and standardisation strategies are still relevant in global food and nutrition strategy as revealed by the variations in the preference for food portion sizes across various countries of the world