What is cognitive play?

What cognitive biases come into play with regards to binary decisions (US politics) vs. multiple decisions (European politics)?

• The US political system is effectively a 2 horse race between Democrat and Republican, (unless / until a new party with more than 33% of the votes breaks this expectation down) with the prelude to the candidates nomination occurring before that. By contrast many European countries use a true multiparty voting system (eg MMP etc) meaning that up to 7 parties can all make it into parliament and need to hammer out a Govt and opposition. Certain cognitive biases impact decision making when decisions are made sequentially rather than between multiple choices, or between just 2 choices, what are the biases that exist between these political systems, and how does this show up in the results?

• Answer:

  The "hammering out" is still there, but in the US the "left" and the "right" have to form coalitions amongst themselves before confronting the "other side."  I would say that there is less cognitive bias involved because due to the vast spectrum of ideology functionally existing under the umbrella of each party one already knows that they are not going to get what they want versus having a smaller party that specifically stands for what you want and then slowly watching it get negotiated away.