THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYfor fictional political parties about which they knew nothing. In this case,
voters showed a bias against the top and bottom positions on a vertical
ballot-paper of six parties. The effect disappeared when the study was
repeated with real, well-known UK parties, which suggests it may be
the less knowledgeable voters who are more susceptible to the effects of
ballot-paper position. The obvious solution to these kinds of biases is
to rotate candidate position on ballot papers in random fashion, but of
course this would incur practical and financial costs.
Even if, by some means, we were able to avoid the influence of all these
extraneous factors on our political decision-making, it’s still quite likely
that we’d fail to make a coolly rational judgement. Drew Westen showed
this in a brain imaging study in which he presented partisan participants
with contradictory statements or actions by their favoured candidates
during the 2004 US presidential election. Not only did the participants
fail to acknowledge the contradictions, but the information they were
presented with activated areas of their brains associated with emotion
rather than areas associated with cold reasoning. It’s as if they were
Political adverts
Political parties spend fortunes on carefully choreographed adverts
with dramatic music and strategically placed children and animals.
But do these Hollywood-style tactics really make much difference?
The evidence suggests that they do. In 1998, against the backdrop of
the Democratic nomination for Governor of Massachusetts, Ted Brader
at the University of Michigan recruited 286 volunteers, ostensibly to
participate in research into TV news. Participants watched a real news-
programme, which included a commercial break into which Brader
had embedded various versions of a carefully-designed political
advert, either in favour of or in opposition to one of the competing
candidates.
Brader found that participants who watched a version of the
positive advert enhanced by uplifting music and images of children
were more interested in the election and more likely to vote than those
participants who saw the same advert with the same script but without
the music (and now set outside a local government building). Viewers
of the enhanced, positive advert were also more likely to vote based on
their pre-existing preferences. Responses to the negative advert were
also affected by the additional music and imagery. Those participants
who saw the version with tense discordant music and black-and-white
images were more likely to choose their favoured candidate on the
basis of topical issues rather than their entrenched beliefs.