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Last Updated: Oct 7, 2008 - 8:29:53 AM |
Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin has gotten the most
heat for being evasive in this season of political debates, but new
research suggests that the contrast between her and the other
top-of-the-ticket candidates has less to do with her lack of
responsiveness than with the three senators' skill at dodging questions
without seeming to.
When Democratic Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. and debate moderator Gwen
Ifill asked Palin to defend John McCain's stance on economic
deregulation, she said, "I'm still on the tax thing because I want to
correct you on that again. And I want to let you know what I did as a
mayor and as a governor. And I may not answer the questions that either
the moderator or you want to hear, but I'm going to talk straight to
the American people and let them know my track record."
She then spoke about her efforts to cut taxes in Alaska.
Contrast that obvious dodge with Sen. Barack Obama's response to
moderator Jim Lehrer's question about how the nation's financial
meltdown would require him to scale back on his campaign promises.
"Well, there are a range of things that are probably going to have to
be delayed," Obama replied. "We don't yet know what our tax revenues
are going to be. The economy is slowing down, so it's hard to
anticipate right now what the budget is going to look like next year.
But there's no doubt that we're not going to be able to do everything
that I think needs to be done. There are some things that I think have
to be done."
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And with that, Obama spent the next 334 words talking about spending
increases and new plans. The transition from the unpopular subject of
program cuts to the popular subject of new programs was artful, and it
helped that Obama did not preface the about-face with so much as a
"but."
"Palin was loosely on topic, but a couple of times she really bungled
the pivot," said Daniel J. Simons, a cognitive psychologist at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who has studied how people
can miss things that are right under their nose. "In one case, she made
it explicit she was going to switch topics. That was not a smooth
transition, whereas if you had watched a McCain or an Obama or a Biden
make that transition, they would not have said, 'I want to talk about
taxes,' they would have answered the question in a way that led into
taxes."
A review of the debate transcripts shows Obama, McCain and Biden all
repeatedly dodging questions, adroitly transitioning from questions
they were asked to questions they wanted to answer.
In a series of particularly relevant experiments, psychologists Todd
Rogers and Michael I. Norton recently showed that most people are
extremely poor at spotting even dramatic discrepancies between
questions and answers. They found the failure was especially acute when
answers were semantically linked to questions -- for example, when a
question about the war on drugs is parried by an answer about health
care. Audiences seemed to notice dodges only when answers were
completely unrelated to the question -- such as responding to a
question about illegal drugs by discussing terrorism.
The psychologists found that irrelevant answers delivered fluently and
with poise scored higher with audiences than answers that were
accurate, on-topic, but halting. And when they had actors deliver the
same answers to audiences -- once fluently and once with "ums" and
"ahs" -- audiences judged the hesitant responses as intellectually
inferior to the fluent ones.
Norton, at Harvard Business School, conducted an informal experiment
during one debate: After the candidates gave their answers, Norton
asked a group of friends to recall the question.
"They got a little bit better over the course of the evening, but by
the time the politicians finished these two-minute
all-over-the-place-answers, even people trying to focus forgot what
question they were asked," he said.
Voters say they prefer candid politicians, but the experiments suggest
politicians may pay a higher price for intellectual honesty than
dishonesty.
"When [Palin] acknowledged the question and said, 'I don't want to talk
about it,' it was intellectually honest, but it alerted people that she
was not going to answer the question," said Rogers, a political
psychologist and executive director of the Analyst Institute, a
Washington-based group that studies voting behavior with an eye to
helping liberals.
Norton and Simons suggest the reason audiences find it difficult to
pick up on skillful dodges is that the human brain is not very good at
keeping track of smooth changes, especially when distracted.
In another series of experiments, Simons has shown that when people are
intently focused on something -- a basketball game on TV, for example
-- large numbers fail to see a man dressed up in a gorilla suit walking
across the screen. In another experiment, Simons stopped people on the
street and asked for directions. Halfway through the answer, he
arranged for two men carrying a door to walk between him and the person
giving the answer. After the door passed by, Simons was gone -- and one
of the people carrying the door was standing in his place. Half the
time, people did not notice the person they were talking to had
changed
Source:Ocnus.net 2008
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