WHICH of these images from the 1992 US presidential race sticks in the mind?
George Bush wooing voters with claims that he’d cut inflation, or the
unfortunate Dan Quayle helping a schoolchild to misspell “potato”. Probably the
latter, because in the memory-retention stakes, politicians’ gaffes beat their
positive attributes every time.
And although most of us say we don’t like negative campaigning and dismiss it
as a turn-off, we’re fooling ourselves, according to propaganda experts Spencer
Tinkham and Ruth Ann Weaver Lariscy of the Department of Advertising and Public
Relations at the University of Georgia in Athens.
Mudslinging works, and election strategists know this. Digging dirt was a
central element of the US presidential elections last year, and in Britain there
have been plenty of dirty tricks and smear campaigns in the run-up to the
General Election on 1 May.
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Tinkham and Weaver Lariscy have gone beyond the mere anecdotal and attempted
to demonstrate the power of the negative in the laboratory. In their most recent
experiment, which is due to be reported to the annual conference of the American
Academy of Advertising in St Louis, Missouri, on 5 April, the two researchers
told 339 volunteers about a Congressional race between two politically similar
candidates in Kentucky. The recruits were unaware that the campaign was entirely
fictitious.
Each of the volunteers watched a 30-second “political commercial” in which
one candidate, Pat Michaels, makes serious allegations about a rival candidate,
John Boorman. Michaels says that Boorman is guilty of falsely claiming to be a
Vietnam veteran who had seen combat, consistently voting for tax increases
despite his assurance that he was against tax rises, and—contrary to his
campaign claims—showing no interest in local issues.
Damage control
The volunteers were divided into 22 groups. All except one group experienced
one of Boorman’s various attempts at damage control—videos, pamphlets or
newspaper ads that either merely claimed that he was a good fellow, had a third
party endorse his candidacy, rebutted the charges levelled by Michaels, or
accused Michaels of some equally heinous crimes.
Different groups were exposed to the damage control either before they saw
the attacking video from Michaels—political analysts call this
“inoculation”—or immediately afterwards. After seeing the propaganda, each
volunteer was asked which candidate would get their vote. They were asked the
same question between 3 and 48 days later.
The negative ad had a devastating effect on Boorman’s fictitious campaign. Of
all the volunteers who were contacted between day 14 and day 48, some 65 per
cent said that they would vote for Michaels. Even the most effective attempts at
damage control—the different types of inoculation—were not quite
effective enough. Among the groups that had seen the damage limitation before
the attack, Boorman was able to secure at the most 50 per cent of the votes,
says Tinkham.
Tinkham and Weaver Lariscy point out that the experiment has its limitations:
after all, Boorman was only allowed to defend himself, not stage a full-blown
positive campaign of his own. But, says Tinkham, the experiment “illustrates
that attacking messages are inherently stronger than defensive messages”.
One of the most striking findings was the enduring nature of the negative
message. The effect of the damage control messages tend to fade with time, says
Tinkham, but the effects of negative advertising are as strong 48 days later as
they are just a few days later. In some groups, the negative impact of the
anti-Boorman message actually increased with time.
“There’s a psychological term used for this, called the sleeper effect,” says
Tinkham, “and psychologists have known about it since the Second World War. We
believe we’re the first to have observed it in an experimental political
campaign setting.” The term doesn’t refer to the soporific effect of election
broadcasts, but describes the tendency of newly acquired attitudes to grow
stronger over time rather than weaker, and for the person to forget exactly what
made them form that attitude. Negative propaganda has a particularly potent
sleeper effect, lying dormant in the minds of the population and re-emerging,
fully intact and as damaging as ever, weeks after its first appearance.
Sticks in the memory
But why are negative memories as hard to budge as compromised Cabinet
ministers? Thomas Gilovich, a psychologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New
York, has shown that gamblers remember their losses more vividly than their
wins, and speculates that people better remember an “unwanted” event because
“they mull it over, and process it more deeply”.
Whether negative information about politicians is the same as an unwanted
event is debatable. A more likely explanation for the sticking power of negative
images, he says, comes from research by social psychologists showing that
because everyone attempts to project a positive image of themselves, negative
information is considered more diagnostic.
Psychologist Donald Laming of Cambridge University, who studies political
strategy, points out that politicians have long outdone the scientists in the
study and practice of thought control. “The work social psychologists can do in
the labs is mere peanuts compared with what politicians have done in the real
world,” he says. “Look what Goebbels did in Nazi Germany. He took control of the
books, the media, cinema and art. Unfortunately, that seemed to work.”
In the psychology lab, it can be difficult to replicate some of the simplest
aspects of real life. For instance, Laming warns, in the Georgia experiment “the
volunteers know that however they vote it’s not going to have an impact on the
outside world”—a fact that could skew the results
Perils of the positive
Another pundit, Peter Bull, a psychologist at York University, who studies
political communication, says that it is not just negative propaganda’s sticking
power that makes it appealing to the politicians—it’s also safer. Positive
claims are vulnerable to scrutiny in the way that negative claims are not, he
points out. A negative claim about an opponent might even be proved wrong with
out adversely affecting the mudslinger.
But consider what happens when a positive campaigning strategy backfires.
When John Major launched his “Back to Basics” campaign in 1993 on Britain’s
“family values” he aimed to secure the moral high ground. Instead, the Prime
Minister’s campaign prompted an era of intensified scrutiny that led to the
unveiling of a series of sex scandals involving members of his own political
party. The ill-fated campaign, swiftly dubbed “Back to Your Place” by smirking
Labour MPs, became a national joke. Major’s halo had turned into egg and fell on
his face.
Besides being easier to remember and safer, negative propaganda gives more
bang for the buck, enabling the politicos to deliver a “cognitively more complex
message [that] provides more information,” says Tinkham.
An earlier study by Tinkham and Weaver Lariscy illustrates the point. In that
study, 201 undergraduate student volunteers watched real-life political
advertisements about a clutch of politicians who were little known in Georgia.
Three of those ads relied on positive pronouncements, and seven on mudslinging.
Then the researchers asked the students questions designed to tease out whether
they liked each ad, found the ads funny, believable, exciting, new, ethical or
fair, and whether they would vote for the candidate in the ad, or for their
opponent.
Double whammy
The most successful negative ads persuaded the volunteers to like the person
who put out the ad, as well as to dislike the person it was attacking. Positive
ads, on the other hand, failed to arouse negative opinions about the
self-promoters’ opponents. That is, self-promotion implied nothing about the
pros and cons of the warring parties. Negative ads “are the easiest way of
campaigning,” Bull says. “It’s the way you can make yourself look good and your
opponent look bad.”
Tinkham and Weaver Lariscy’s research also showed that political ads, whether
they are negative or positive, must be “entertaining”, by which they mean
exciting and new—but not necessarily funny. “Funny can backfire,” says
Tinkham. Dealing with weighty issues did not enhance the persuasive power of the
ad. Neither did repeating dirt on opponents that was already well known. If you
want to win votes the message is clear: slam your opponents with brand new,
entertaining allegations of sleaze, or incompetence, but do not discuss profound
political issues.
“We were a little discouraged,” says Tinkham. “It seems that a salient
political topic or an important issue had less impact than whether [the ad] was
perceived as new.”
And there may be even more reasons for anyone interested in political debate
to be discouraged. According to some propaganda experts, last year’s US
presidential campaign, which saw Clinton’s re-election, marked a new era of
sophistication in negative electioneering.
Canny Bill, veteran survivor (so far) of numerous allegations of sexual
impropriety, decided to have his cake and eat it, by relying on negative
propaganda which didn’t appear negative. Attacks on Republican candidate Bob
Dole’s position on healthcare or taxes were regularly prefaced by statements
that praised Bob Dole Ă la Mark Anthony in Julius Caesar.
“The Clinton ads were warm and negative and fuzzy,” Tinkham says. Dole’s
press supremo John Buckley told The New York Times: “They [the Clinton
team] have masterfully mouthed just enough positives while sticking the shiv in
Dole’s back.” The knife in Dole’s back may not have been real, but the veteran
Republican’s political funeral certainly was. A victory for the new-style
negative campaigning? Or did Clinton’s victory have something to do with the
challenge presented by the untelegenic Dole?
The answer is not clear. But what is clear, on current form, is that the
electioneering of Britain’s main political parties in the final weeks before the
General Election will be just as negative and far less subtle.
Additional reporting by Rachel Nowak
