You will all have had experience of somebody flying off the handle on the slightest provocation - brushing against them in a crowded pub, or pulling out in front of them in traffic. I suspect this everyday behaviour helps us understand politics.

What I mean is that there's a tendency to over-react to small offences and under-react to larger ones. We see this on both left and right.

On the left, compare austerity to Johnson's recent Islamophobic remarks. Yes, the latter has led to some deplorable attacks on Muslim women. But austerity has been many thousand times worse. Not only has it made us much worse off than we'd otherwise be, but it also caused Brexit (pdf) with the social divisions and poverty that'll result, and it might well have caused thousands of deaths to boot. And yet there isn't thousands of times more anger at Brexit than there has been about Johnson.

And on the right, the abuse Corbyn is getting for the very serious allegation that he's a terrorist sympathizer doesn't seem much greater than that Ed Miliband got for eating a bacon sandwich inelegantly.

The ratio of outrage to cause is large for small causes, but smaller for greater causes.

There are two analogies here. One is with the certainty effect: people pay more to reduce probabilities of loss from 10% to zero than they do from (say) 50% to 40%. The other is with the Easterlin paradox; happiness is much flatter over time than are incomes or political freedoms (pdf). What we have in all these cases are moods being more stable than underlying stimuli: attitudes to risk, happiness or outrage.

Why? There are many reasons why we might over-react to small slights, such as a sense of personal insult, umbrage at the violation of a social norm, or the desire to grab attention. There are also reasons to under-react. One is cognitive; people don't make connections between social phenomena and so don't link arid Budget speeches to Brexit or to deaths. The other is a psychological coping mechanism whereby we distance ourselves from horrors. Stalin expressed an uncomfortable truth when he said that one death is a tragedy but a million is a statistic.

There is, however, a problem here. It's that of the boy crying wolf. If you are always complaining, nobody will take you seriously when you have a genuine grievance. The more noise you make, the less signal there is: if you make a fuss about a Labour leader eating a bacon sandwich, people won't take you seriously when you make graver allegations. Which might, I suspect, help explain why opinion polls don't change much from week to week: inattentive voters zone out from partisan complaints even if they might be warranted.