Why Politicians Fail Us
“The natural human optimism that allows people, election after election, to believe campaign promises also consigns them to repeated bouts of disappointment.”
“There’s no question that the president has failed to live up to the expectations of many of his supporters—expectations he created with his empyrean campaign rhetoric. But it turns out that human beings are easy to disappoint. Research suggests that even when people know that someone has nothing but bad options to choose from, they still blame the decider for a bad outcome. And while disappointment and regret and even anger are often spoken about in similar terms, psychologists see them as distinct emotions, triggered by different sorts of events and motivating us to act in different ways.”
