For a sensible democracy, ad hominem attacks are essential

The first and most fundamental issue is the binary nature of the decision. Even though all choices eventually come down to a selection between two things, the psychological evidence shows that human beings are really bad at making such a choice. The studies show that humans are no good at choosing between several different things and we are pretty much useless at deciding between two different things, such as remain or leave. We are only any good at making binary decisions when the two things we have to choose between are similar.

This means that a proportion of the votes in the referendum were from people who could not really decide but made a choice because they felt they had to. What happens in such situations is those individuals then subconsciously seek rational justification for their random selection.

Another series of psychological effects relate to the ballot paper itself. One issue is known as the “order effect”. In surveys and multiple-choice tests, people tend to answer either the first option or the last option. This is because of personality differences in whether an individual is a “primacy” person or a “recency” individuals. Primacy personalities are most likely to choose the first thing they see, and recency people tend to select the last option. To counter this effect, academics, market researchers and so on will change the order of the options for each person taking part in the questionnaire. That way you eliminate the impact of the effect of the order of the choices.

The referendum ballot paper was the same for everyone, meaning there was an inherent bias in the responses. A higher number of people have a “recency” personality which makes them more likely to select the second option on the ballot paper, which was “leave”. That too will be a contributory factor to the small margin in favour of “leave”.

I wonder how it is if the choices are placed side by side instead ?

Another issue with the ballot paper is the length of the questions. There is evidence that people tend to choose the shorter option in a questionnaire or multiple-choice exam. To counter this, academics, for instance, will make sure that each option is pretty much the same length. In the referendum ballot paper, the remain option was 37 characters, and the leave one was 24 characters. This also means the referendum had an inbuilt psychological tendency for people to choose “leave”, rather than “remain”, if they were undecided.

Interesting stuff. As far as the issue itself goes this makes a lot of sense : a crappy campaign, bereft of the the leadership it deserved, without clear information presented and properly explained, reduced to simplifications and fearmongering. So a binary choice being used to determine a complex issue without adequate explanations. Indecision makes sense.

And yet... with all the information floating around, how did it come down to such issues as the wording an arrangement of the ballot ? More specifically, but somewhat tangentially to the article, how is it that people aren't able to point to Nigel Farage and quickly say, "Yep, that man's a complete and total pillock." Or, "Boris is clearly a pompous, goofy-haired buffoon who shouldn't be in charge of a village fête, much less let anywhere near the Cabinet" ?

Now, some (most, even) Brexit voters may in fact have done so, of course, and they would have voted on the issue, not the personalities. But in prior elections a sizeable percentage of voters actually voted for UKIP (thus giving them prominence and legitimising the discussion), suggesting they were wholly unable to recognise dickishness. And while ad hominem attacks aren't very nice, they are, I claim, absolutely necessary, logical, and justifiable. Even if you can't evaluate a position, evaluating dickishness is an essential skill in a representative democracy. We are already epistocratic (https://decoherency.blogspot.com/2018/07/voting-prove-youre-worthy-mortal.html) in the sense that we generally elect people to vote for us, rather than making decisions themselves. The old quote that "small minds discuss people" is a laudable goal but a foolish instruction. It doesn't always hold true in all circumstances, and a representative democracy is one of them. Had the dickish nature of the Brexiteers been properly recognised, the debate wouldn't have been censored (because there are a very few extremely intelligent and respectable - albeit misguided IMHO - individuals who want to leave the E.U.) but it would never have come to the forefront of politics. The need to judge people's character and intentions is hardly a task for small minds : it is essential to a functioning society.

The real crisis isn't even so much that the vote was flawed, it's that the government hasn't got a sodding clue how to deal with that reality.

https://medium.com/@grahamjones/the-psychology-of-brexit-b0f62bad10ca