Don't Watch TV for Results, Try Twitter

Watching the election returns last night, I consistently had faster results on Twitter than any of the TV networks.

Go social media!

More Political Ads Publicity for Angelini

See the interview of James Angelini, Ph.D., at the University of Delaware's UDaily.

“What I think the producers of these messages have to realize is that they cannot take it to the extreme that some political advertisements have gone over the past eight to 12 years,” Angelini said.

Angelini in Newsweek: Startling Political Ads

My co-author on a study of negative political ads was featured in an online Newsweek segment today. Read the comments of James Angelini, Ph.D., online, in a piece titled, Expertinent: The Biology of Negative Advertising.

The original research was published in the Journal of Advertising titled, Psychophysiological and memory effects of negative political ads: Aversive, arousing and well remembered, and a PDF of the research can be retrieved for research purposes here.

PR Case Study: Don't Anger Comedians

When I was undergraduate, we looked at a few case studies in a public relations course I took with Dr. Mac at NMSU. It seemed that when you looked at 60 Minutes ambushing a CEO, there was almost no way to look good.

However, when you expect to get grilled by a CBS program, you do not expect to get grilled by David Letterman.

This happened to Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain when he canceled his Letterman appearance purportedly to head back to Washington to discuss the Wall Street bailout.

As you can see, that angered Letterman, who felt that a vice presidential candidate should be able to step in.

However, when Letterman found out that McCain did not head back to Washington and instead was in a different CBS studio, taping an interview with Katie Couric. Letterman's jest toward McCain turned far more pointed.

It shows that comics who usually use their sharp wits can be more acerbic when they feel it is appropriate.

One has to wonder whether Letterman's widely reported rant is part of the reason the democratic candidate Barack Obama holds a large 8 percentage point lead (50% to 42%) according to Gallup's latest three-day tracking poll.

No matter how this election turns out, I think that "campaign suspension" decision and related handling of the press will be taught as a PR case study one day.

Real-Time Debate Emotion Fascinating

Last night I watched much of the John McCain / Barack Obama debate on CNN.

During the debate, they had continuous response measurement data across the bottom of the screen. That tracked real-time emotional responses (positive versus negative) across the bottom of the screen with separate lines for Democrats, independents, and Republicans.

Having collected such data in the lab, I was at times more interested in the lines than the candidates.

It also reminded me what a complicated topic emotion can be. Consider the case when the candidate you like (i.e., a positive emotion) attacks the candidate you do not like (i.e., attacks are a negative emotion).

In order to be able to respond in real time, you have to parcel out the good from the bad. And in the end, these voters exhibited that pattern. When McCain attacked, the red line went up. When Obama attacked, the blue line went up.

The critical line, I suppose, was the green line for independents. That line consistently but slightly favored Obama.

In fact, I was pretty amazed that all three lines tended to be slightly higher (I don't have access to the statistics) for Obama than McCain. These were voters from swing state Ohio, so this trend may be indicative or may represent the small sample. There is no way to tell.

Another interesting trend was all three groups' reactions to McCain's repeated pattern of insisting to talk after Jim Lehrer tried to cut him off. It seemed that no matter what McCain said, all three lines stayed low, seemingly punishing him for violating debate etiquite. Again, there is no way to know what they were thinking, but it was a rather consistent trend.

I may tape CNN next time and watch on another network. I like to see the CRM data, but with limited cognitive capacity and all, it is difficult to fully process the arguments while simultaneously tracking three groups' opinions.

Paris: "I'll See You at the Debate, Bitches"

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

Childish? Yes. Hilarious? Also yes.

Does Voting Republican Make You Fat?

Or does being fat make you vote Republican?

I love maps. They catch my eye. The other day, I was passing through some site or another (I forget), and I saw a map of the most obese U.S. states. When I saw it, I thought it looked a lot like the results of the 2004 presidential election.

Then today, I saw a story about the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention releasing new statistics on the most obese states.

So I wondered whether the states whose electoral votes went to George W. Bush were actually fatter than those who voted for John Kerry. Being a research type, I crunched the numbers.

Indeed, those residents of states whose electoral votes went to Bush are indeed more obsese (26.53%) than those states whose electoral votes went to Kerry (24.11%), t(49) = 3.22,
p = .002.

This is especially telling given that the Bush states contain the skinniest state, Colorado (18.7% obese).

Although the slightly more than 2% point difference may seem modest to you, the statistics suggest that there is less than one quarter of a percent chance of observing a difference this big (or bigger) given that there is no real difference between the states. And it suggests a difference of almost 10% between the states (i.e., 2% is about 10% of 20%).

Obviously my headline is misleading, as there is most likely no direct causal link between the two variables. However, the connection is an interesting one and likely points to a third variable that causes both obesity and Republican voting. The new story suggested that rural populations are likely to be more obese, and most Bush states are predominantly rural.

Glean what you wish from the data. I found them to be interesting.

Interesting Political Campaign

Check out this page by Sean Tevis, who is running for state representative in my native state of Kansas.

It's an interesting campaign.

A Game Theoretic View of Politics

First, allow me to premise this by saying that I don't care what you believe, and I have no interest in telling you whether you are wrong or right.

Now that that's out of the way, here's something that I have been thinking about.

Liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, you likely believe what you believe. That is, you likely think that you are correct and the other side is wrong.

Further, you may sit around and wonder -- if you are so right -- why other people don't just come around to your point of view. You're right, after all.

So you might be perplexed that the latest Gallup poll shows a dead heat between John McCain and Barack Obama at 44% each. Surely one side is the best, so how can we be so completely divided?

Let's put that question on the shelf and talk about something completely different. Let's talk about the prisoner's dilemma -- a tool of game theory.

The basic idea is so familiar to television crime dramas that I won't spend much time describing it. Two people are caught by the police, accused of a crime, and separated. Each person is offered a deal if they rat out the other one. The best possible overall outcome is for both partners to stay silent. If either one of them takes the deal, called defecting in terms of the game, the one who defects goes free and the other is severely punished. If they both defect, then they both get much longer sentences than if they had both stayed silent, or cooperated in terms of the game.

So what do you do? Cooperation is the best, on average, solution. However you can try to help yourself at another's expense by defecting. Unless your partner defects.

A single trial of prisoner's dilemma is not very interesting. Instead, human nature begins to reveal itself with iterated prisoner's dilemma. That is, two partners (opponents?) play the game over and over again. After each trial, each partner is given a sentence commiserate with who defected and who cooperated. You keep adding them up, and, as with golf, the player with the lowest score wins.

Although you may find it difficult to believe, there are actually contests centered around the iterated prisoner's dilemma. People program complex strategies into a computer to compete, because in the reiterated prisoner's dilemma, you know what your partner did on the last trial (and those that came before). You could program the "golden rule," for example, but I venute that you would lose a lot.

And it turns out that the best long-term strategy appears to be elegantly simple. They call it tit-for-tat. You cooperate on the first trial, and then you do whatever your opponent did on the last trial. The best long-term average is repeated cooperation, and if both partners cooperate until the end of the game, they are both assured the lowest possible long-term solution.

Actually, the algorithm is improved with the addition of occasional forgiveness so that you do not get stuck in an endless loop of defections.

However, in a population of computers (or people) practicing tit-for-tat, there develops an opportunity for a small proportion of the population to exploit their neighbors. I shan't bore you with the particular details -- and I cannot even remember where I read this -- but Wikipedia suggests that perhaps it was Richard Dawkins' brilliant book The Selfish Gene.

The idea is that with an entire population playing by one set of rules, an opportunity develops to exploit that system by playing by different rules. In the case of tit-for-tat; however, only a few rogue individuals can buck the system.

Returning to politics, it occurred to me that this relative homeostasis over time of political parties owes to some sort of equilibrium due to principles of game theory (admittedly not a novel idea).

That is, if the entire population was conservative (in the classical theoretical sense), for instance, there would be much hierarchy, tradition, and rule-governed behavior. This would create an opportunity for agents to exploit those rules. In such a society, agents that most valued sovereignty of the individual (i.e., classical liberalism) would be able to profit disproportionately.

The converse should be true, too. Look at Soviet Russia for example. When all wealth was to be shared equally, most people had no choice but to share. But for those that could establish a hierarchy and amass wealth (i.e., the politicians), they had wealth beyond compare.

In a parliamentary system, there are multiple constituencies that must form collaborations in order to achieve a majority or plurality. In our two-party system, we do something similar by courting certain sections of the population into the various parties (i.e., the bases).

Earlier this decade, "soccer moms" were all the rage and were expected to decide elections. There will be another key constituency this year.

If you look at the history of this country, neither political camp has dominated for too long. It seems to me that this is based in game theory. As the pendulum begins to swing one way, it creates a vacuum behind it. This vacuum then is an opportunity for some (likely) disenfranchised constituency. As they rush in to fill the vacuum, balance is restored. Several people have made a similar argument in Republicans' aggressive adoption of the evangelical community, for example.

Surely this idea is not new. It was new to me, and it seems at least plausible. Even if it implausible, it was fun to think about for a couple of hours.

Propaganda Sadly Alive and Well in America

When I started my journalism career, I attended a lunch paid for by Memorial Medical Center, then the sole hospital in Las Cruces, N.M. I was flat broke at the time, and my wife was pregnant with our first child. Nonetheless, after the event, I wrote a personal check to MMC to pay for the lunch to avoid any appearance of impropriety.

The evidence suggests that one cannot believe a single word ever uttered by a military analysis on U.S. television news since before the start of the war in Iraq.

Critics will write this off as bashing by the liberal media. But if you take the time to read all 11 pages of this story, I cannot imagine how you fail to be moved. Everything that is good and sacred about the First Amendment is brought into question herein.

From Sunday's New York Times:

Message Machine
Behind Military Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand
By DAVID BARSTOW
Published: April 20, 2008
The Pentagon has cultivated “military analysts” in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the Bush administration’s wartime performance.

Hispanic Media Matters in Texas

Hispanic Spending in Texas to Surpass $2 Million

Primary Showdown Benefits Telemundo, Univision as Clinton, Obama Camps Pour Money Into Lone Star State

By Ira Teinowitz

Published: February 25, 2008

WASHINGTON (Adage.com) -- The Hispanic market in Texas is seeing an unprecedented boom in campaign spending as presidential hopefuls Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton vie for supremacy in the Lone Star state.

Together, the candidates spent nearly $2 million advertising to Spanish-speaking Hispanics in California, and broadcasters are saying spending ahead of the March 4 Texas primary could top that.

"I've been in Spanish television since 1985, and this is most active season I've ever seen," said Enrique J. Perez, senior VP-sales for Telemundo Station Group. "For the first time, Hispanic media is being planned side by side with general media."

News Story on Our Political Ads Research

The local Fox News affiliate came by the lab on Friday to do a story about an article we have appearing in the December 2007 Journal of Advertising.

The research was done with James R. Angelini, of the University of Delaware, and Sungkyoung Lee, of Indiana University.

You can read a news release about the research at the Texas Tech Web site.

Growing Voting Power of U.S. Hispanics

From CNN.com article titled, Inside the Hispanic vote: Growing in numbers, growing in diversity:

(CNN) -- As Democratic and Republican presidential candidates scour the country for votes during the 2008 campaign, they'll inevitably court the Hispanic community, a voting group growing rapidly in number and diversity.

The Hispanic vote is neither homogenous nor loyal to one party. Though the current political moment seems to favor the Democratic Party, experts say that affinity should not be taken for granted.

The Hispanic community is the fastest-growing minority group in the United States, according to the U.S. census.

But its percentage of the electorate is lower than its numbers as a whole because of lower citizenship rates, less voter participation and a youthful demographic. Of the nation's more than 44 million people of Hispanic origin, about a third are too young to vote.

But all that's changing.

Joe Consumer Still Not Mass Content Provider

I have used this space to criticize past proclamations of media consumers as major content creators.

As I read again about the Hillary Clinton-based parody of the Apple 1984 commercial, I felt myself begin to be swayed. This ad might have a profound effect on the campaign. Perhaps I was wrong.



Then I read on. The ad was created by Phillip de Vellis, a Democrat and Obama supporter, according to CNN.com. Not so fast, my friend. De Vellis is no ordinary media user. Until the 1984 ad, de Vellis worked for Blue State Digital, an Internet company that provides technology to presidential campaigns, including Obama's.

Oops. Not exactly an outsider. Just a free-lancing insider. And that's not quite a media revolution.

Indiana, Texas Tech Student Politics

Yesterday I wrote about how I believe the political orientation of my subject pool may be affecting our studies on social reality perception. I wanted to provide a visual aid to demonstrate this.

I borrowed this measure of political orientation from Indiana University professor Erik Bucy, Ph.D. In addition to the measure, he sent me a pie chart with political orientation frequencies taken at IU this spring (2007).

Keep in mind that Indiana is a red state through-and-through, although IU is the more liberal of the major state universities (Purdue students tend to be more conservative).

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Indiana University Students 2007

Texas Tech University Students 2007

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These pie charts support my contention that Texas Tech students in 2007 are far different than Rutgers (the state university of New Jersey) students in the the late 1990s in terms of political orientation.

Political Orientation Predicts Crime Estimates

There were 266 murders in New York City during 2006, according to the FBI.

We asked Texas Tech students to estimate how many murders there are on the NYC subways each year. The median number was 56. However, more than 8% of our participants estimated more than one murder per day on the subways alone.

What makes some people think that crime is so prevalent? And how does that happen in the brain?

The data are in for my most recent foray into the world of social reality. And I must admit that I am fascinated.

Last fall we ran a study to try to answer this question.

We have known for a long time that television viewing correlates with fear of crime. The more people view, the more fearful they are.

Shrum (2001) showed that if you tell people to try hard when making decisions about crime, then the relationship between TV and crime estimates drops out.

We thought that we could extend that by illustrating the role of a good memory.

But the data did not work. I had some vague idea why the study might have failed, but I was not sure. The thing that kept jumping out at me was that the original study was performed at Rutgers (a blue state), and we're here in West Texas (red-ville).

So we tried a more complete replication of the original study, and I tacked on some political and religious leaning questions at the end. They were the very last questions on the questionnaire so that they could not affect other answers.

Once again we have failed to replicate the original study. But now I just might know why. Political leaning appears to play a prominent role in estimating crime. Our data show that for conservatives, it is a mean world.



Recall that these new experiments were trying to explain why telling people to be "accurate" negated the effects to TV viewing. That is, when people in New Jersey were told to be accurate, they gave lower estimates of crime.

But accurate is relative. Just how likely is a crime if you walk through a New York City park every night for a month? There is some probability tied to this, but we could not likely every know it.

So, if you have a lot of fear, then what do you do when you are told to try really hard to be accurate?

You become more afraid.



For conservatives, the accurate world is a world with more crime. For liberals, the accurate world is a world with less crime.

Replicating Shrum's data depended on accurate becoming less crime-filled for those who watched a lot of TV. This simply did not happen for our conservative West Texas students.

The New Jersey sample surely had a minority of conservatives. These data are for 86 students who identified themselves as "strong conservative" or "conservative," 75 students who identified themselves as "center," and just 41 who identified themselves as "liberal" or "strong liberal."

These data add an interesting new piece to the puzzle.

I cannot, as a scientist, help but ponder the relationship to the current debate surrounding the war in Iraq. If the world is meaner to you, then Iraq represents a bigger threat. Admittedly this is speculative, but interesting to ponder.

Political Strategies of Terrorists

A story in today's New York Times suggests that the Pentagon and CIA are looking into Americans' bank records in terrorism-related investigations (read about it here to avoid NYT logon). Privacy-related concerns will have many balking. The begs the question of how to crack down on would-be terrorists without turning citizens against their own government.

As much as I hate waiting for the future, I enjoy looking back at the past. I like the twists and turns my life has taken.

In the early 1990s, I was a political science major. At New Mexico State, they called it government ... like Harvard. I ended up changing my major, but I completed the coursework for a minor in government (however, due to an oversight apparently on my part that was discovered years after graduation, I took a required class pass/fail and did not officially "get" the minor).

One of the first courses I took at NMSU was introduction to political science (GOVT 110G) with Neil Harvey, Ph.D.

Harvey's research focus, in part, involves Chiapas, Mexico, and we talked a lot about Latin America in that class.

Although it was fall 1994, I think a lot about that class these days. One of the things that we talked about in that class was the goals of terrorism. It seemed largely tangential at the time, but I learned something that I remember these many years later.

Most Americans, it seems, feel that the true goal of terrorism is evil. Among other things, this is illogical. Many evil people fill the history books, but few of them achieved evil for evil's sake.

Consider the Sept. 11th attacks on World Trade Center, Pentagon, and flight 93. Although the means could not be more deplorable, the goals are legitimate political goals. The means are evil. But the end is not evil. Instead terrorism is a political weapon of the weak.

I am a pack rat, and I save things. I still have all my notes from my undergraduate career. Thinking through 12+ years of haze, I looked up my notes on terrorism from Prof. Harvey.

On Nov. 14, 1994, I wrote in my notes, "What are the tactics? Small groups with few resources: bombing train terminals, kidnapping, blowing up airlines. Puts fear into people and makes the government more repressive. Single, young, better educated males. Misfits. Can't see the different between the good and the bad within the system. Fanaticism based on hatred. The cause may not be so relevant. Democracies are particularly susceptible to terrorism."

The part that stuck with me is in the middle. Terrorism makes the government more repressive. In a free and open society such as the United States, it is easy to move around. This freedom makes us susceptible to terrorism. When a major terrorist attack occurs, fear spreads. More importantly, however, the government almost inevitably begins to constrict.

Patriot Act.

Wiretapping.

Sound familiar?

Terrorism puts an administration in an extremely unenviable position. With no restrictions, it is difficult to curtail vulnerability to terrorism. Suffer a repeat attack, and public opinion is sure to turn against the administration.

Hence the fact that most governments will begin to become more repressive. As the fear from an eminent terrorist attack subsides, citizens begin to chafe at the new restrictions. Their ire drifts away from the terrorism and toward their own government.

In a small Latin American country, this discontent might be sufficient to lead to an overthrow of the state. This is virtually impossible within the United States; however, recent mid-term elections suggest that a vote-based coup may be under way.

Consider that a recent news release from the Gallup organization reported, "But in the latest poll, his approval rating on terrorism (44%) is roughly the same as his 45% rating on the economy. The 44% terrorism approval rating is one of the worst of his presidency ..."

As a communications and cognitive science scholar, I will leave it to others to debate the policies. My over-arching question is that if even I can remember this terrorism-repression-discontent link, why was that not a major talking point from Washington?

Instead of pushing the Patriot Act (for example) as a necessary evil, it seems to me that a more effective communication strategy would have been to come out saying, "One of the goals of terrorists is to drive a wedge between a government and its people over security policies. We are going to make our country safer, but we are going to balance safety with the civil liberties of our citizens."

I understand that hindsight is 20/20, but it seems with all of the hundreds of advisors in Washington, someone could have done a better job.

Media Bias

Mostly, I will avoid all politics on this Weblog. Scientific research has shown that most claims about media bias are greatly overstated. However, I saw an interesting difference in coverage between two major news Web sites today.

Headlines
cnn.com: Bush cutting short vacation
foxnews.com: Bush Pledges Support

Unfortunately for media critics, between the time that I pondered this post and the time that I wrote it, foxnews.com switched to the cutting vacation short angle. Thus, the perceived "left" and perceived "right" Web sites came to agreement on the headline at least. My guess is that the AP wire headline took the vacation angle on the writethru and when the story was updated, the AP headline was used instead of the locally written version.