The Year in C-SPAN Archives Research

The Year in C-SPAN Archives Research, Volume 7

Robert X. Browning

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781612497259
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Process
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Volume 7 of The Year in C-SPAN Archives Research series focuses on the relationship between democracy and the media. Using the extensive collection of the C-SPAN Video Library, chapters cover Trump political rallies, congressional references of late-night comedy, responses of African American congresswomen to COVID-19 bills, and congressional attacks on the media through floor speeches in the House of Representatives and Senate.

The C-SPAN Video Library is unique because there is no other research collection that is based on video research of contemporary politics. Methodologically distinctive, much of the research uses new techniques to analyze video, text, and spoken words of political leaders. No other book examines such a wide range of topics?from immigration to climate change to race relations?using video as the basis for research.

1 EVALUATING CANDIDATES FAST AND SLOW

Can Initial Impressions Be Socially Influenced?

Julie Grandjean, Jeffrey Hunter, and Erik P. Bucy

In the popular imagination, democracies are built upon a foundation of reasoning, deliberation, and citizens working together to evaluate the best possible candidates to lead them. This notion, while comforting, is not necessarily based in fact. Rather, people’s voting decisions reflect a variety of factors, many unrelated to the enlightened reasoning the supposed ideal citizen is assumed to employ (Lodge et al., 1989). Sometimes, decisions may not be deliberate or even conscious but reactionary and automatic, reflecting voters’ assessment of nonverbal cues. Indeed, the ability to read expressive displays develops in the early stages of life (Antonakis & Dalgas, 2009). Although people often don’t trust their own ability to make snap judgments about political candidates, reliable inferences about leadership traits and election winners can nevertheless be made on the basis of thin-slice exposures to political images lasting a few seconds or less (see Benjamin & Shapiro, 2009; Olivola & Todorov, 2010; Todorov et al., 2005)

While experimental research has convincingly demonstrated how quickly viewers are able to arrive at accurate assessments of political candidates on their own, this project seeks to slow down and socially assess the judgments behind these outcomes. We are also interested in the extent to which people change their initial voting decision after a group discussion. Similar to the thin-slice experimental paradigm, this study asks viewers to rate still images and short video clips of political candidates using footage from the C-SPAN Video Library. But rather than stopping there, we employ online focus groups to elicit discussion about the factors that influence viewer judgments—and whether the social context of discussing political evaluations with others causes some participants to change their mind after the fact—and why. Our approach thus complements and extends previous studies in which participants were only able to offer a one-time candidate assessment based on a short exposure.

To create the conditions for social evaluation, the study employs focus groups as a context for participants to share the smaller cues and larger factors that influence judgments of candidate viability—an approach that contrasts with previous studies in which researchers have mostly used close-ended questions asking viewers to instantly judge candidates based on traits such as competence, like-ability, and authenticity. In our focus groups, we show participants a mix of still photographs and video clips from recent political debates from around the country and first ask for a snap judgment about which candidate won their election. After each thin-slice evaluation, we give participants the opportunity to articulate the reasons for their initial vote and ask if anyone would like to change their vote based on the discussion. We find that about 20% of participants do change their mind when given the opportunity to rethink their initial assessment.

THINKING FAST AND SLOW

The contrasting styles of candidate judgment that this study seeks to understand can be summarized by the differences between System 1 and System 2 thinking, or the dual processing model of reasoning, judgment, and social cognition (see Kahneman & Frederic, 2005; Stanovich & West, 2000). Kahneman (2011) defines System 1 as the type of thinking that “operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control” (p. 20), while “System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations” (p. 21). The operations of System 2, Kahneman notes, are often associated “with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration” (p. 21), indicating how this mode of thought plays out over time. Most people assume important decisions involve rational thoughts and that intuition, feelings, and rapid assessments are either unrelated or unhelpful to that process (Kahneman, 2011). However, research suggests that individuals rely heavily on System 1 processing (Olivola & Todorov, 2010)—and if their decisions involve other people, they often rely on the primary source of social information available: facial cues (Grabe & Bucy, 2009; Masters, 1992).

Studies have shown, for example, that assessments of intelligence can be inferred on the basis of facial cues alone (Zebrowitz et al., 2002). Other politically relevant traits such as competence (Ballew & Todorov, 2007; Mattes et al., 2010) may also be inferred quite rapidly, below the level of conscious awareness. This process often takes less than a second, as people unconsciously compare between thin slices of experiences (Olivola & Todorov, 2010). According to Marcus (2013), “our brains know far more than our conscious minds know” (p. 107). Indeed, while our brain may preconsciously respond within the first 100 milliseconds of a visual stimulus, conscious awareness of the stimuli only appears after half a second (Marcus, 2013). The efficiency of the visual cortex allows the brain to make relatively accurate snap judgments based on such short duration exposures, even while the mind may be consciously unable to fully explain how we arrived at that decision.

System 1 thinking is also relevant to decisions typically assumed to be deliberative, such as those surrounding vote choice. But even here, instead of relying solely on candidate policies, news coverage, or even personality, voters might rely on certain cognitive and affective heuristics or judgmental shortcuts (Stewart, 1997). Nonverbal cues from still images, for example, are referenced as people form first impressions, and these impressions can have lasting resonance and remain fixed in memory (Antonakis & Dalgas, 2009; Naylor, 2007). In politics, nonverbal aspects of candidate presentation are critical to voter evaluation of such traits as competence, integrity, likeability, and general fitness for office—and can be controlled in ways to manipulate voters’ preferences (Rosenberg & McCafferty, 1987, p. 44). Faces are especially potent sources of social information (Grabe & Bucy, 2009), projecting the emotional state and motivational intent of the communicator while conveying important insights about more enduring personality traits (Olivola & Todorov, 2010).

System 1 thinking fits within the “thin slice” research paradigm, which holds that “exposures to expressive behavior as brief as a few seconds tend to be highly predictive of reactions to much longer exposures” (Benjamin & Shapiro, 2009, p. 523). The most common form of thin-slicing is the ability to assess and make social judgments of other people (Ambady et al., 2000), including the visual presentation and nonverbal behavior of political leaders (Gong & Bucy, 2016; Masters, 1992). Thus, politicians’ facial cues and physical appearance alone can trigger powerful associations in voters’ minds. When inferences made from thin-slice exposures are systematically investigated, they are predictive of election outcomes at a rate that far exceeds chance. In one well-known study, assessments of competence from brief (1 second) exposures to photographs of pairs of U.S. Senate candidates predicted winners in 68.8% of races shown (Todorov et al., 2005). A follow-up study also using still images of candidate faces (Ballew & Todorov, 2007) found an even higher prediction rate of 72%.

Using the same general procedure but utilizing short (10 second) videos from gubernatorial debates, Benjamin and Shapiro (2009) found higher predictive accuracy for candidate videos evaluated with the sound off than with the sound on. When sound was involved, and viewers were allowed to hear the candidates speak, the success rate of correctly guessing the winner dropped. As Gladwell (2007) has observed in his summary of the thin-slice paradigm, the popular book Blink, more information is often not only useless—it is also impairing. Rather than enhancing the ability to identify election winners, videos of candidates with the sound on cue partisanship and policy stands that allow viewers to more accurately assess the candidates’ party affiliation (Benjamin & Shapiro, 2009). Interestingly, when viewers start thinking too much about how others voted in an election and rely on System 2 thinking, they are more likely to make the wrong guess about election winners than when they go with their initial “gut feeling” (Ballew & Todorov, 2007, p. 87).

Political Appearance

Inferences from candidate appearance have the strongest effect on undecided voters, a phenomenon that holds up cross-culturally (Sussman et al., 2013). Voters tend to assess political candidates with preexisting expectancies—for gender, age, authenticity, attractiveness, and other factors—about how a politician should look and behave. Previous studies show that viewers positively evaluate leaders who exhibit expected nonverbal behaviors, while they suspiciously eye and closely scrutinize those who violate these nonverbal expectancies (Bond et al., 1992; Bucy, 2011; Gong & Bucy, 2016). Violating nonverbal expectations erodes support, while meeting them promotes confidence. Indeed, images of leaders that violate normative expectations of appropriate political behavior can trigger critical evaluations by viewers and provoke widespread speculation among journalists (Bucy, 2011, p. 199). Studies have shown that voters dislike candidates deemed too young or too old, preferring candidates who are in the prime of life (Hain, 1974; Oleszek, 1969). Indeed, candidates who look too young, such as “Mayor Pete” Buttigieg, who was in his late 30s during the 2020 Democratic primaries, look inexperienced compared to older candidates like Joe Biden, who was in his late 70s. On the other hand, older candidates can be seen as close-minded, which tends to dampen voting intentions. Regardless of perceived competence, whether a candidate has a “baby face” is a good predictor of election results in collectivist countries, though it is worth nothing that it is not in more individualistic-oriented (Western) societies (Chang et al., 2017, p. 105). So, while the phenomenon of inferring politically relevant traits based on candidate appearance does hold cross-culturally, these inferences have varying impacts depending on the cultural context.

Another expectation that voters hold about politicians is authenticity, an alignment between the candidate’s public/political self and their private self (Louden & McCauliff, 2004, p. 93). In recent years, authenticity has become a salient lens through which voters evaluate candidates and officeholders (Pillow et al., 2018). Discrepancies between the expectations that citizens have for those running for office and how candidates present themselves in public can erode perceptions of authenticity, and therefore credibility, among voters (Pillow et al., 2018; Rosenberg & McCafferty, 1987). Research also reveals a marked tendency to evaluate candidates according to physical attractiveness (Lawson et al., 2010). Indeed, judgments of attractiveness can produce a well-known “halo effect” where individuals who are considered more attractive are also judged more positively in terms of intelligence, social skills, and success (Hart et al., 2011, p. 182). Voters with less political knowledge and interest tend to evaluate attractive candidates more positively, while political sophisticates tend to correct or even overcompensate their evaluations to be more negative toward attractive candidates (Hart et al., 2011, p. 190). Interestingly, unattractive candidates are not judged as negatively as attractive candidates are judged positively, because negative stereotypes are not considered a valid justification for judgment (Hart et al., 2011, p. 197).

Gender is another important factor in candidate evaluation. Johns and Shephard show that male and female candidates are evaluated differently: Men are seen as stronger, while women are deemed warmer (2007, p. 443). Female politicians deemed attractive are also seen as nicer and more dynamic, which may indirectly boost voting intentions (Sigelman et al., 1987). Yet, in a study on the influence of weight on candidate evaluations, Miller and Lundgren (2010) show that obese female candidates are judged more negatively than nonobese female candidates, but obese male candidates are judged more positively than nonobese male candidates.

Other research on nonverbal displays of political candidates has examined differences in the reception of visual cues, whether between voters in different national contexts (e.g., France and the United States) (Masters & Sullivan, 1989a, 1989b), or the relationship between crisis news and nonverbal leader displays (Bucy & Newhagen, 1999). This literature finds that tepid reactions or miscalibrated nonverbal responses provoke doubt in viewers because leaders should be capable of handling emergency situations—especially communicating reassurance and resolve amid dire circumstances (Bucy, 2003). When facial displays and other nonverbal behaviors (e.g., gesture, tone of voice) are deemed inappropriate, there is an emotional cost that impacts the offending politician negatively. Rather than conveying reassurance, the performance sends “the wrong emotional tone and, instead of promoting curiosity or other harmless cognitions, evokes doubt, anxiety, and other aversive responses” (Bucy, 2011, p. 213).

Socially Influenced Decisions

The role of social influence in group decision-making has been studied extensively, not only in political psychology but also...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Evaluating Candidates Fast and Slow: Can Initial Impressions Be Socially Influenced?
• 2. Read the Room: The Effect of Campaign Event Format on the Use of Emotional Language
• 3. Constructing 21St-Century Citizens: Congressional Discourses In U.S. Citizenship Policy Speeches
• 4. Talkin’ and Testifying: Black Congresswomen’s Response to Covid-19
• 5. Toeing the Line in Polarized Times: Congressional Attacks on the Media
• 6. Congress as Comedy Audience: A Discursive Analysis of Late-Night Comedy Cited in Congressional Debates
• 7. Gender Schema and Politics: A Cognitive Study on Gender Issues in Politics
• 8. Private Foundations and the Health Security Task Force: Using C-Span to Understand Perceptions of Expertise
• 9. Breaking the Fourth Wall: C-Span2 and Senate Leaders’ Views of Television Coverage
• 10. Examining Economic Reality and Media Spectacle at Trump Campaign Rallies
• 11. Donald Trump’s Crucible: Analyzing the C-Span Video Archive of Wisconsin Trump Rallies
• 12. A Computational Exploration of the Evolution of Governmental Policy Responses to Epidemics Before and During the Era of Covid-19
• Conclusion
• Contributors
• Index