Science Friday: Why negative campaigning works! An Overview
As political consultants, we catch TONS of blow-back for negative campaigning.
However, when we are asked why we engage in negative campaigning, we don’t do ourselves any favors by flippant remarks such as “Well, negative campaigning just works!”
As professionals, we all know it just works. We know it intuitively, we have been taught it by mentors’ rules of thumb, and we have seen the numbers tank 20 points when an explosive direct mail piece / issue hits. We have the war stories.
We also know that we can pump out positive, fluff bio pieces by the truckloads and not interest the press one darn bit. However, we send out one, small universe hit piece and the press goes NUTS!
However, let’s not just blame the press or just retort “It just works”.
Instead, let’s take a moment to explore the real culprit : the human mind.
Yep, it’s your brains’ fault that negative campaigning works.
It is your brain’s fault!
Principle #1 : Bad Interactions have stronger, more pervasive, and longer lasting effects.
In a 2001 study by Roy Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky and Catrin Finkenauer “Bad is Stronger Than Good”, the results are clear! In their conclusion, “It appears to be a basic, pervasive fact of psychology that bad is stronger than good.”
The study performs a comprehensive review of different literature of “bad versus good” It reviews everything from evolution to psychology to communication to relationships to emotions and moods to rewards and punishment to how we process information.
In fact, when speaking of processing information:
“Thus bad information does receive more thorough information processing than good information. Bad information is more likely to seize attention, and it receives more conscious processing as well.”
It does not matter where you look, the human mind is wired – “Bad interactions have stronger, more pervasive, and longer lasting effects.” PERIOD!
Principle #2: Loss Aversion – Losses loom larger than gains.
Human brains are wired to be loss averse, by a large margin. When faced with potential losses, our brains become totally irrational and develop a blind spot … by a large spread.
“The “loss aversion ratio” has been estimated in several experiments and is usually in the range of 1.5 to 2.5.” Kahneman, Daniel (2011-10-25). Thinking, Fast and Slow (p. 284).
Essentially, the human responses to loss is stronger than the response to corresponding gains. This is commonly referred to as prospect theory, and this concept changeds Economics and how we think of human decision making.
Further suggested reading: Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (it really is an almost must read)
Conclusion
In summary, our brains are wired to remember the bad. It appears to an evolution trait developed so that we may live: remember the bad tiger and survive the threat – OR – remember the good smelling flower and get eaten by the tiger.
In summary, we also know that if we can make you fearful of losing something, we can awaken emotions in your brain that you didn’t know you had.
In this cluttered, busy and fast moving world, is it any wonder of what breaks through?
We can motivate your brain with bad, scary information, and it is cheaper to do so.
However, it ain’t political consultants’ fault! It is your brain’s fault!
The next time your neighbor or the press goes crazy about a negative piece do not reply “It just works”.
Instead tell them why it works:
“It’s your brain’s fault – your brain remembers & thinks about bad stuff more and your brain is loss averse by a 2:1 margin. Change your brain, and I will change my campaign tactics.”
The calls are starting – first time candidates and incumbents are starting to call in order to explore potential campaigns in 2014.
Awhile ago, I wrote a check list for first time candidates, and while I still stand by this simple checklist, I have something additional to add to the list.
You need a political consultant.
Why? Let’s explore, because its Science Friday.
Why you need a political consultant
Setting aside hindsight bias, let’s begin with that fact that after 30 years in political consulting and political campaigns, I don’t know many things for certain, but I know the following to be absolutely true:
Our brains are designed to take shortcuts and often unwillingly and sometimes even willingly deceive us.
Our brains deceive & fail us
Let’s be honest, if you…or ‘someone you know’…is exploring a run for office, you most likely have a healthy ego. It is this healthy ego that allows you…or your friend… to feel like you have something to offer the public that they should “buy.”
Great.
The moment you verbalize your intention to possibly consider a run for office, people & your own brain begin to lie to you – even more than normal.
Why People Lie
Your friends lie because they like you and don’t want to have a candid conversation.
Your friends are not intentionally lying, but they will say thinks like “I think you would be great.”, “We need good people like you to run.”, “You would be leaps and bound better than the nit-wits we have now.”, and various other pleasant things.
People who do business with the office you seek lie because you may win.
They are looking out for the own self interest and they will be very nice to you, especially in the early stages of exploration.
Your friends and people lie to you because they don’t know better.
Your friends & others may give you an honest opinion that you may make a fantastic public official, but don’t know the first thing about political realities, political campaigns, or the campaign process.
Why Your Own Brain Lies to You
This entire Science Friday will be dedicated to the study of irrationality, heuristics and fallacies.
Let’s just state two things as facts as a summary of the entire field of research & literature:
Our brain has two parts, an emotional part and a rational part. These parts must work together and are often in conflict.
Our brains take shortcuts (heuristics) in order to make order of the world and to survive.
If one does not have a meta experience and take the time to think about thinking, you are helpless to fight the shortcuts your brain is conditioned to take.
Even if you have a meta-experience, if you do not build deliberate systems to force yourself to fight your brain, you are helpless.
This is exactly why intelligence analysts who are dealing with far more complex issues other than “should I run for office?” build these critical thinking processes into their workflow.
Bottom line: our hunches, our guts, our thoughts are often just dead wrong.
Let’s explore some common issues:
Confabulation
As humans, we are often completely ignorant of why we make the decisions we do (like run for office). We make the decision, then perform mental gymnastics to rationalize the decision. It happens lighting quick, unconsciously and then we rationalize our decision by filling in our memories and just making stuff up. We do this so often we are blissfully unaware that our brains are doing it. We simply must rationalize the decisions we make.
Fun fact: If you are asking about running for office, you want to run for office. Most likely, you are asking around seeking a rational explanation to justify your decision.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect
I don’t want to insult you, but all humans (even great political consultants) fall subject to the Dunning-Kruger effect.
This effect tells us that most of us are extremely poor at estimating our own competences and the difficulty of the complex tasks in front of us. True, the effect is more pronounced among unskilled labor, but this makes the trap even more dangerous for aspiring politicians.
As David McRaney tells us, “The less you know about a subject, the less you believe there is to know in total. Only once you have some experience do you start to recognize the breadth and depth you have yet to plunder.”
“In the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” – Russell
Political campaigns are complex operations that unless you have participated in them before, you can’t possibly know what it is like to be a candidate.
Here is another issue, just because you have participated in a campaign as a volunteer/manager/staffer, you can’t possibly know what it is like to be a candidate.
Side note: This especially holds true when it comes to the area of raising money. Remember there is a major difference between raising money for your favorite charity/business and raising money for your own political campaign. I routinely take the amount a first time candidate tells me they can raise, cut it in half and cut it in half again. More than likely, this is the amount they will raise.
Subjective Validation
Remember those encouraging words your friends tell you? You are falling subject to subjective validation.
The subjective validation tells us that people are prone to believing vague statements and predictions are true, especially if they are positive and address you personally.
The point
These are just the tip of the iceberg
These are just three of the cognitive traps that we as humans fall into. Worse? We fall prey to them all the time without noticing, and these are just the TIP of the iceberg. (To see a more comprehensive list – look to Wikipedia or look at the additional reading listed at the bottom of this post.)
The Solution
Lucky for you and your brain, there is a solution: hire a great political consultant.
Any great political consultant must study brain function. It is our job to understand the decision making process so that we can understand how voters make decisions, how political decisions are made, and how we can affect these processes.
Our job is not only to help you navigate to victory, but also to have the experience and courage to be the check against your brain.
At Ozean, we receive feedback after every campaign cycle that the number one thing our clients appreciate most is our ability to cut through the “fog of a campaign” and be candid – even when it hurts.
Ozean does this by building into our processes the systems to combat not only your cognitive biases but our own cognitive biases. This takes effort, skill, and it takes an understanding of how our brains naturally deceive us.
We are continuously floored by the number of political consultants that are operating on their guts, their rules of thumb, and their own flawed thinking.
In closing, your friends lie to you & your brains lie to you. You need a political consultant to help you navigate these waters, and you better make damn sure your consultant won’t tell you only what you want to hear.
If you would like to discuss your potential and use our critical thinking processes, please do not hesitate to contact Ozean.
Scandals were categorized on the nature of scandal (abuse of office, financial, sex) to see if there were differences.
The results reveal that those senators seeking reelection while confronting a scandal suffered a six percent decrease from their expected vote. They also attracted higher quality challengers who spent more money against them
Scandals involving immoral behavior hurt incumbents the most, while financial improprieties hurt them the least.
Another KEY quote from the paper is as follows:
For a scandal to have any impact on an election, potential voters have to know about it and care about it. The former is the job of the press. Voters rely on journalists to provide vital information about candidates, so that informed decisions can be made at the ballot box. Though the sources for that information are changing, the valuable role that the press plays in providing it is not (Graber 2009; Iyengar and McGrady 2006).
The study is also worth reading for the review of the literature on the subject. It covers party switching, voter turnout, campaign finance violations, corruption charges, and partisan differences.
Conclusions about Political Scandal
How much is a political scandal worth?
“The coefficients are basically the same. Incumbents committing financial improprieties suffered the smallest decline (4.3%), while those displaying behavior seen as immoral suffered the largest decline (6.5%). This leads one to conclude that voters do not necessarily care about the nature of the transgression, but only that a transgression has occurred.”
“While there was essentially no difference in the number of Democrats or Republicans involved in scandals, the results reveal that voters did punish Republicans slightly more than Democrats. The results also show that incumbents, regardless of party, suffered most from objectionable behavior related to matters of morality, such as sexual indiscretions. The vast majority of incumbents were inclined to seek reelection, even in a hostile environment, rather than abandon their Senate careers. The evidence proves that, in fact, two-thirds were victorious in November. So while scandals blunt the incumbency advantage, they do not eradicate it.”
Gotta love science.
My hypothesis is that candidates not having the advantage of incumbency suffer much greater.
It is science Friday (Wednesday edition), and I am off on an electronic sabbatical after a very difficult week. Therefore, I am admitting right now that I am lazy and this may be the laziest post ever written for Science Friday, but that is still no excuse NOT to bring you a study in the field of politics.
I came across this post on twitter, and I thought it was PERFECT for Science Friday.
Does social media tell us anything about voting behavior?
Is social media a valid indicator of political behavior? We answer this question using a random sample of 537,231,508 tweets from August 1 to November 1, 2010 and data from 406 competitive U.S. congressional elections provided by the Federal Election Commission. Our results show that the percentage of Republican-candidate name mentions correlates with the Republican vote margin in the subsequent election. This finding persists even when controlling for incumbency, district partisanship, media coverage of the race, time, and demographic variables such as the district’s racial and gender composition. With over 500 million active users in 2012, Twitter now represents a new frontier for the study of human behavior. This research provides a framework for incorporating this emerging medium into the computational social science toolkit.
The most interesting thing from the working paper to me is the following:
First, the data do not include any information about the meaning or context of a name mention (e.g., “I love Nancy Pelosi” vs. “Nancy Pelosi should be impeached”). The relative share of attention compared to the opponent is all that is needed.
In a relatively new study released by the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication titled “The ‘Nasty Effect:’ Online Incivility and Risk Perceptions of Emerging Technologies”, an interesting theory emerges.
The study measures subjects’ understanding of a science topic after reading online comments posted on the story.
The study has wide ranging possible effects. As noted by others:
Now a study in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication suggests that rude comments on articles can even change the way we interpret the news. – NPR
In other words, just the tone of the comments . . . can significantly alter how audiences think about the technology itself.
Researchers found that even knowledge of science did not seem to mediate the effects of the comments. – JS Online
So basically, as political actors who are attempting to affect public opinion, the comments on a news article are almost, if not MORE important than the article itself.
My guess is this has a relationship to the social norm of highlighting the behavior one would like to see adopted and by making a thought public – no matter how vile the thought is – allows others to think that this thought is ‘normal’ and not out-of-line.
For politicians and campaigns, this study is important and your political efforts must now include rapid response to on-line articles whether newspaper, blogs, online TV stations, etc.
A 2008 study published by the American Political Science Association by Alan Gerber, Donald Green & Christopher Larimer lays out a convincing case of how social pressure can lead to increased voter turnout.
This study does exactly the type of large scale experiments that the GOP should be doing more of.
This study shows us that by using social norms (rules of conduct that are socially enforced) we can have a greater effect on voter turnout, with some words of caution.
In this experiment, conducted prior to the August 2006 primary election, 180,002 HH were used. HH were assigned to treatment groups and were sent one mailing 11 days prior to the election.
HH were randomly assigned to the control group or 1 of 4 treatment groups. Each treatment group had 20,000 HH and 99,999 were in the control group.
Each HH in a treatment group, received one of the four mailings. The control group received none.
All four treatment groups received the basic message of “DO YOUR CIVIC DUTY – VOTE”
Group 1 “Civic Duty” Group. This group is a baseline. It does little besides emphasizing civic duty.
Group 2 “Hawthorne” Group – Adds to Group 1 a mild form of social pressure. By adding a “Hawthorne effect” or “You are being studied”. It limited social pressure by promising researchers would neither contact nor disclose the results.
Group 3 “Self” Group – Adds more social pressure by informing recipients that who votes is public information and listing the recent voting records of each registered voter in the HH. It also put “VOTED” next to those that voted and a blank spaces to those HH members that had not.
Group 4 “Neighbors” Group – Adds even more social pressure by not only listing the HH voting records, but also the voting records of those living nearby. Like the “Self” mailer, the “Neighbors” tells the group that researchers are planning on updating the chart after the election.
The results
After the election, turnout was measured
Group
Turnout
Diff
Control Group
0.297
Civic Duty Group
0.315
0.018
Hawthorne Group
0.322
0.025
Self Group
0.345
0.048
Neighbors Group
0.378
0.081
The Neighbor group had a 8.1% increase in turnout over the control group.
This is impressive.
As the study states:
It is important to underscore the magnitude of these effects. The 8.1 percentage-point effect is not only bigger than any mail effect gauged by a randomized experiment; it exceeds the effect of live phone calls (Arceneaux, Gerber, and Green 2006; Nickerson 2006b) and rivals the effect of face-to face contact with canvassers conducting get-out-the vote campaigns (Arceneaux 2005; Gerber and Green 2000; Gerber, Green, and Green 2003).
The study does go on to say nicely that the “enforcement of norms is potentially costly” meaning, this technique REALLY pisses voters off.
Also for practitioners to keep in mind, we must ad partisanship into the equation and test; however, it is data worth considering. Read the entire study here.
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