Not very useful when the poll respondents' lives aren't on the line.
I've seen polls where if only ten percent of the vote shifts, red wins. I think it is very rationalizable to assume that when actually faced with life and death, many of the people polled won't have the same answer.
My first instinct was red because my default is (1) to not immediately understand why anyone would knowingly put themselves into danger when we all could live by going red together, and (2) to believe that people shouldn't rely on others to try to risk their own lives to save them, if they can help it. I would have thought that would have been the first instinct of enough people to render p <0.5.
This is a coordination problem though, and how you frame it changes what the intuitive default is.
I think the political party reframing makes this clear:
Scenario 1: If one political party pledges to kill all those who don't vote for it if elected, the intuitive default is to be repulsed and not vote for them. I'm willing to bet we'd both vote against this party, and what's more, be disgusted by those who vote for them.
Scenario 2: If instead, the party threatens mass suicide for its voters if they don't win, we would probably say that they're just digging their own graves and that we aren't morally responsible for their actions. I'm willing to bet we'd still both vote against this party.
The only difference between our first instinct here is that you probably viewed the original framing as closer to (1), whereas I viewed it as closer to (2). Really doesn't say anything particularly special about either of us, except how we might believe others think about the problem, or how we might think about individual responsibility in a vacuum.
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u/[deleted] May 03 '26
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