On our minds: Overpriced toasters and their democratic analogues |
What Toaster Merchandising Can Tell Us About American Democracy |
 | | President Trump last month at a rally in Mosinee, Wis. He said on Tuesday that balloting already underway was “a fraud and a shame” and proof of “a rigged election.”Al Drago for The New York Times |
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I am becoming concerned that President Trump’s threats to refuse to peacefully transfer power might be becoming the $300 toaster of American political life. |
Have you ever gone to a fancy home goods shop to buy one fairly basic item, such as, say, a toaster? You have simple requirements — you just want a machine that makes toast — so you don’t expect to spend that much money. |
When you get to the toaster section of the store, you do the smart thing and walk straight past the end-aisle display of a $300, wildly over-featured, designer-branded, top-of-the line model. You walk past the $100 one next to it, too, despite its multiple slots and promises to adjust to all of your bagel-related needs. |
No, the cheapest one in the aisle will do fine. No bells and whistles, no fancy colors. It makes toast. It’s $75. It’s yours. |
Later that night, it hits you: You spent $75 on a toaster. A really basic one, that promised no special treatment to your bagels! It’s possible to acquire a really good toaster for about 30 bucks. So how did this happen? |
You’ve fallen victim to a cognitive bias called the anchoring effect, in which being presented with one number or option causes us to evaluate all subsequent questions in relation to that first one. Stores know this, which is why that $300 toaster was in such a prominent position. They didn’t necessarily expect anyone to buy it, but wanted it to anchor their customers’ perception of the other options. The uber-fancy version made your $75 choice seem really cheap, even though in an objective, unanchored view it was wildly overpriced. |
Which brings me back to President Trump’s repeated insistence that he might refuse to leave office if he loses the election. This raises the terrifying prospect of Mr. Trump attempting a coup if he is not declared the winner of the election. It is an extreme violation of democratic norms. Analysts, politicians and voters are understandably worried. |
But we should also be wary of how the growing focus on that possibility could be anchoring our ideas about what constitutes a crisis, because the reality is that there are many things short of a coup that could be profoundly damaging to American democracy. And some of them are already happening. |
Take, for example, Mr. Trump’s refusal during the debate on Tuesday to condemn white supremacist groups and militia groups and call for them not to engage in violence. Instead, he told the Proud Boys, a far-right group, to “stand by” — a message that some within that group took as an endorsement of their violent tactics. (Mr. Trump walked back the comments a day later and said that he does not know who the Proud Boys are.) |
If you’re focused on the possibility Mr. Trump will refuse to leave office, then the encouragement of far-right groups suggests the disturbing possibility that such organizations might come out in support of him when that time comes, leading to violent clashes in American cities as extremist militias fight to keep Mr. Trump in office. |
That is certainly a scary thought. But it’s also $300-toaster thinking, because anchoring on that possibility can make the violence already happening in America cities seem less bad by comparison. |
Ari Weil, a researcher at the University of Chicago, has been tracking vehicle ramming attacks, in which people drive cars into crowds of protesters. Since nationwide protests against police violence erupted in May, he has identified 43 attacks in which the driver appears to have had “malicious intent,” and over 100 attacks total. In many cases, the drivers specifically admitted to political motivations, or had a history of participation in extremist groups in person or on social media. (Most of these incidents are tied to the far right, but this week a California woman was charged with attempted murder after driving into a pro-Trump rally.) |
Mr. Trump has also encouraged the police to use physical violence. In 2017, for instance, he told the police not to be “too nice” to suspects when arresting them. In Minneapolis last month, he said that it had been a “beautiful sight” when the police shot Ali Velshi, a journalist covering a protest for MSNBC, with rubber bullets. |
Even experts are influenced by anchoring. Many worry about an extreme scenario in which the federal government bans elections and political competition, which would indeed be very scary. But focusing on that can anchor their perceptions, warping their views of other, less clear-cut forms of democratic dysfunction. |
“When police engage in excessive surveillance, incursions on civil liberties, and arbitrary force as a matter of routine patrol, many scholars of American politics are reluctant to consider it a violation of democracy and instead deem them aberrations in an otherwise functioning democracy,” even though those same experts would be quick to condemn such tactics as authoritarianism in other countries, Vesla Weaver, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University and Gwen Prowse, a Ph.D. student at Yale, wrote in a recent article in the journal Science. |
Unfortunately, experiments suggest that it’s hard to avoid being influenced by an anchor, even if you are aware of it. But one thing that does seem to help is forming your own arguments against the anchor. |
In the case of the toaster, that might mean reading reviews and looking at their cheaper recommendations as a basis to argue with yourself against keeping your pricey purchase. And in the case of the health of American democracy, that might mean thinking about what rights other democratic governments provide to their citizens, and using that to inform your judgments about the rights and protections afforded to Americans today. |
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