Inoculation Theory

In the early 1960, William McGuire began to build the theory of inoculation in and around communication and persuasion.

The theory has since been studied extensively with nuances offered (a large debt to Michael Pfau).

The communication theory uses a metaphor from biology that is especially relevant with COVID as the topic of the day. 

A person or entity can expose individuals to a weakened argument (line of attack) and by doing so can “inoculate” the individuals exposed to future, potentially more robust attacks.

The theory is not without detractors, and some researchers have dismissed the theory all together.

However, research continues and the field, like all social science, continues to develop.

In the political context, we often come across the theory when dealing with negative information we have found out about our own client and are wrestling with how to deal with a potential line(s) of attack.

A Brief Note About Negative Campaigning

It works.

A Brief Note About Opposition Research

It will be found.

Inoculation in a Political Context

We have established that negative campaigning works and that a good opposition research investigation will uncover your deep secrets.  If they aren’t uncovered by a researcher, your secrets will be likely hand-delivered by a jilted ex or an upset past acquaintance that does not share your politics.  (Trust me on all of this).

We have learned from experience, you must “hang a lantern” on your issues and by doing so inoculate yourself.

Inoculation in Politics

The theory works like this, I hang a lantern on my problem and I attack my own campaign.  In this case, I am open about my problem, but most importantly I tell you!

Critical to this is the individual must perceive a threat.

How do we do this?

“My opponent is going to attack me (or our campaign, our movement) by saying…..”

I then work to pre-empt their argument or refute it.  I simply give the audience the ammunition to refute and / or build additional refutations.

By doing so I am weakening the “shock” and the effectiveness, but more importantly I am inviting you to generate counter arguments or I am providing you the counter arguments.

This is extremely effective when the attack is likely to come from the other party in the hyper-polarized times.  Why?  The threat appears greater and often the audience is then more motivated to generate counter arguments.

Research On Inoculation

I am going to point you to two studies.

The first is one of my go to research tactics – look for a meta study on your topic.  Meta-studies are fantastic – they are a review and summation of available research on a topic.  If you can find a good, recent one, you’ll save a lot of time AND have a fantastic reference sheet for further study.

In this case, we have a meta-analysis done by Banas & Rains in 2010.  It offers a much better in-depth coverage of the nuance in the field than I can offer in this post.

It concludes while there is counter-findings in the field, a review of the available research finds “inoculation treatments are more effective than no-treatment controls or supportive treatments in fostering resistance to attitude change. “

The second study is an older study (1990), but I include it because it is specific towards campaigns.

Michael Pfau, et al look at inoculations via direct mail in the 1988 presidential campaign. Dukakis v GH Bush. In my kind of experiment (and to be fair), the researchers attacked both candidates. The Bush messages attacked Dukakis for being weak on crime, and the Dukakis messages attacked Bush for support of agriculture policies and policies that hurt rural America. (A criticism is these lines of attack appear almost cute or quaint in the current times, but that is an issue for another day.  Another criticism is the study is a relative low sample study and likely due for a replication study using a larger sample.)

In short, they find inoculation to outperform post-hoc refutation – and the experiment was conducted via direct mail. This finding was robust among strong party identifiers.

Conclusion

We have previously explored the hyper-partisanship and polarization that exists in America.

A past client of mine disagreed with my bleak assessment and said reform is “easy” – just make all races non-partisan and THEN the campaigns will be about character and not politics. 

I am known for my candor, and how that has gotten me into trouble in the past.  I have been making an effort – a true effort – in selecting my words more carefully.  Instead of saying “You could not be more wrong!” I found myself saying “Well, let’s see if we can find any research that agrees with your position….” 

 We are fully aware that party identification is the leading factor in voting – said another way – “Republicans tend to vote for Republicans and Democrats tend to vote for Democrats”.

In voting behavior, most don’t need to know details other than party to vote the “right way”.  If we both identify as a member of the same party, we are very likely to share values and I don’t need to know much more than the party of a candidate in a general election to “vote correctly.”

So, the conventional wisdom – if we REMOVE the party especially from the ballot by making all elections non-partisan, it will force candidates and voters to go deeper.  The short cut is removed…..so simple, right?

Not so fast my friend!  Chris W. Bonneau, University of Pittsburg, and Damon M. Cann of Utah State explored the non-partisan elections of judicial candidates.

I believe this is a brilliant way to approach this subject.  The state bar associations take many extra steps in a futile attempt to remove “politics” from a political process.  In addition, judicial elections are … lower intensity races (said another way – kinda boring) with lower spending and lower voter engagement.

PERFECT for exploring the strength of party ID on nonpartisan races.

In short, what they found is there is no shortage of cues or shortcuts available to interject partisanship into a campaign.  In fact “voters are able to identify the partisan identification of candidates from ideological and issue based cues even when candidates’ explicit partisanship is omitted from the ballot.”

In fact, the results show it is kinda easy.

In a sense, they conclude “nonpartisan elections ineffective at removing the partisan element from elections.”

We observe the exact same thing in municipal races we have worked in and or polled.  Whether it is the local party interjecting to activate party ID or outside groups endorsing to activate party ID – there are NO shortages of signals and for the most part – the numbers don’t lie.

CONCLUSION

Sorry to be the popper of bubbles – but the proposed reform of nonpartisan elections being a solution is not backed by research.  In fact it is explicitly dis-proven. 

Sadly, in America, for the most part there is no such thing as a nonpartisan election – especially if one party has an incentive to interject partisan cues.

I once met an attorney who was at the top of her field.  I mean she is a cracker-jack attorney with a crazy intellect and extremely well respected in the legal field. 

I asked her how she became such a great attorney.  Her answer was simple, “When I was in law school, I read every footnote.”

In today’s Science Friday, we have a case where the supplemental information is as interesting, if not more interesting than the study itself. 

Today’s study: “Psychological targeting as an effective approach to digital mass persuasion”  Authored by scholars from Columbia, Stanford, Wharton, and Cambridge. 

It is an interesting study that explored effects when ads are matched to one of the big 5 personality traits, the OCEAN MODEL. 

Study Findings

In research that will stun no one, the authors find”people’s psychological
characteristics can be accurately predicted from their digital footprints, such as their Facebook Likes or Tweets.”

This is the part the drives me nuts – of course this makes sense.  If you tell me what you like, I can then predict things, and I can tailor my messaging….but HOW does one do it?

The authors go on to write “that matching the content of persuasive appeals to individuals’ psychological characteristics significantly altered their behavior as measured by clicks and purchases. Persuasive appeals that were matched to people’s extraversion or openness-to experience level resulted in up to 40% more clicks and up to 50% more purchases than their mismatching or unpersonalized counterparts.“

Cool, right?  That is a pretty big lift.
But the real cool stuff is in the supplemental.

How to match Likes to Personality

The supplemental demonstrates HOW they matched advertising to personality types.  That’s the magic.

And it all started with one of those stupid personality tests on facebook.

So, there you have it…easy peasy….except for the organization that was conducting the personality tests stopped making the data available to researchers.

But could one reverse engineer what the researchers did?   I think so….

CLICK HERE TO TAKE YOUR FREE PERSONALITY TEST (Just kidding)

Conclusion