Back in the summer, I got a memo from a club where we have a membership – which is not a fancy place, but it does have a nice pool where my kid learned to swim and some tennis courts where I developed a very sore elbow this year. Anyway, there was this note from the club management that reminded us that there’s a dress code, and added this: “In particular, please refrain from wearing hats backward at any time while on club property.”
You know, I had missed the hats-forward rule – and while I’m not a hat-backwards guy, I’m kind of offended on their behalf. I mean, does wearing a baseball cap the way a catcher does really suggest disrespect of other club members and the people who pull their beer taps?
My unconcern about this sort of rule suggests, I guess, that I’m ill-suited for club membership. If it were up to me, I’d push some different rules — like, maybe I’d have the club crack down on parents who allow their youngsters to whine and scream ceaselessly as older people (that would be me) are trying to relax by the pool or sip a gin and tonic.
I’m dreaming, of course. But our little club isn’t unusual in that it reflects a reality of contemporary life: We often seem to worry about the wrong things. And since we have finite amounts of both time and capacity for attention, that misplaced worry can distract us from what really ought to draw our concern.
And that, it seems, is key to the odd choices that voters routinely make, leading them to vote against what’s actually in their own best interest. A whole nationwide political campaign could be built on distractions from what really matters. I could even argue that this is exactly what’s happening. (1:35)
Take, for instance, all the attention to our southern border and its supposed impact on crime – and the talk about supposed illegal voting by non-citizens. Our most recent former president has claimed that the administration of President Joe Biden had created a society awash in “bloodshed, chaos and violent crime” – those are Donald Trump’s words, and he says a lot of it caused by illegal immigrants. Trump has asserted without any evidence that millions of non-citizens have voted for Democrats. Our country, Trump said last year, is becoming a “lawless, open borders, crime-ridden, filthy, communist nightmare.”
None of that is true, but its repetition has drawn believers. In fact, there’s almost no incidence of non-citizens voting, immigrants are less likely than native-born Americans to commit crimes, and crime actually has been falling in America since Biden took office. Crime did surge early in the pandemic – murders were up by nearly 30 percent, assaults rose by more than 10 percent. But that occurred in 2020 — when Donald Trump was in the White House.
But beyond voters’ attention to issues that ought to concern them less, you get a good sense of voters’ misplaced priorities in looking at what doesn’t draw their attention. In one section of a recent Economist/YouGov poll, voters were given a list of 15 topics and were asked which they considered important. At the very bottom of the 15, by voters’ rating: climate change and the environment.
That assessment is stunning, revealing that voters still minimize the importance of an issue that threatens the survival of hundreds of millions of people, which immigration surely does not. The terrible impact of hurricanes in recent weeks is only the latest indication of the consequences of the carbon that has been spewing into the atmosphere at enormous rates since the start of the Industrial Age.
This is the world’s greatest health threat, according to the UN. But while campaigning in New York City last month, Donald Trump offered this curt assessment of climate change: “That’s not our problem,” he said. In fact, it is. We’re more inclined, though, to worry about less important stuff, including the notion that immigrants are a threat to our democracy and our physical safety.
Psychologists have some ideas about why we tend to focus on matters of less importance than the longer-term threats that ought to demand our attention. In considering climate change, for example, foremost among the reasons we tend to dismiss the reality might be something called the availability heuristic, a concept that was developed by psychologists in the 1960s.
A heuristic is a mental shortcut that humans adopt that enables us to quickly make judgments without deep thinking — often unconsciously, and frequently drawing on our biases. You know, it’s how we might decide whether it’s safe to walk on a dark side of the street without knowing the crime statistics for that block, or to put some extra salt on our dinner even if we haven’t seen how much salt was already added in the kitchen. Heuristics developed evolutionarily, helping our ancestors to survive uncertain threats. They are convenient for decision-making today, but they often lead us to incorrect judgments.
So, consider the extensive media coverage of crime and the influx of migrants at the border – spurred by a decade of constant focus by Donald Trump, with the support of Fox News and other parts of the right-wing media establishment. The availability heuristic says that has lead us to over-estimate the danger posed by those issues. Yet the true impact of climate change is only beginning to seep into our consciousness – because it hasn’t been placed in front of us every day by politicians and the media who support them.
We may say we want candidates to focus on our most pressing issues, but that would require us to overcome the heuristics that we rely upon to make most decisions of the day. So we worry about other matters, including those that are right in front of us — like, you know, backward hats on guys at country clubs.
If you consider that hardly worth worrying about, I’m with you. But if you’d like to get riled up about something that matters, how about taking a whack at drawing your neighbors’ attention to what ought to be the most prominent issue of this election season? Talk to them about climate change, and take a look at which candidates are going to do something about it. I, for one, would take my hat off to you.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.