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.

Diaper Sales Also Need Opinion Leaders

From the print edition of the July 14, 2008, Advertising Age:

P&G relies on power of Mommy bloggers
Giant calls then the 'new influences'; will recruit up to 15 to headquarters

By JACK NEFF
jneff@adage.com

PROCTER & GAMBLE CO.'S Pampers is bringing as many as 15 top "mommy bloggers" to the company's Cincinnati headquarters later this month in what appears to be the company's biggest effort yet to reach online influencers.

That it's doing so with all-expense-paid trips could place P&G in a controversy similar to those that have confronted other marketers, such as Microsoft, in years past. But P&G sees the move as an emerging standard industry practice to inform bloggers, rather than buy their loyalty.

P&G should bring me to Cincinnati. I would enjoy being informed. I'd even give a research presentation gratis.

Gore Enlists Opinion Leaders on Energy

An interesting story in this morning's New York Times caught my eye. Former vice president Al Gore is calling upon bloggers to help spread the word about his energy independence campaign at http://wecansolveit.org/.

Gore's group seems to be leaning upon a bedrock of communication theory, the two-step flow. Dating back to the 1940s, this body of research found that certain opinion leaders got a lot of information from the media, and those opinion leaders were then influential within the community. Thus, the media exerted a two-step influence on public opinion.

Gore's attempt is nonpartisan in nature, and at the very least, I hope that it gets people talking about something more meaningful. The current rhetoric in the presidential campaign is extremely hollow, especially the call on more drilling, which estimates show might lower gasoline costs by 2030! We'll have much bigger problems in 22 years.

Invisible Social Forces in Name Popularity

How do people name their kids?

Often people name a new baby after some relative or friend of the family.

However, in the mass media era, naming children has an often unnoticed social component.

I have four daughters, and we went through a different process in naming each of them.

The source of the names, however, interests me each year when the Social Security Administration releases their top names.

They have a very nice Web site where you can track the popularity of names over time. For me, this is particularly fascinating process. For each of my first three daughters, we selected a name that was trending upward.

In the above figure, I have tried to denote the year we picked the name with a vertical black line. However, keep in mind that we would have been looking at SSA data from the year before. We did not know what names would be selected in 2000, for example.

The fourth and final kid's name does not fit the pattern -- it has been stable for a few years -- however, we really picked that name in 2000. It was an alternate for the second kid. And back then it was very much trending upward.

Now let me try to let you in on our basic algorithm. We tried to pick names where they would not have three other kids in their class with the same name, but not so uncommon they would hate us ("Hi, this is my daughter, Rihanna").

Somehow other people must have been having similar thoughts, whether or not those parents' intentions were conscious.

These curves really do fascinate me. With very little deviation, these names became increasingly popular each year. That's an interesting social phenomenon in a country of 300 million people.

Somehow this reminds me of Adam Smith's invisible hand working its way through society.

I'd be interested in your thoughts.

Poor Miley: Did Vanity Fair Exploit?

Photo courtesy of Vanity Fair magazine.

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Poor Miley Cyrus. You might know her as Hannah Montana.

I have four daughters, three of whom are of television viewing age. So I know Hannah Montana.

Now some risque pictures in Vanity Fair magazine have raised eyebrows.

Until now, many parents were pro-Cyrus because the 15-year-old didn't dress like, well, a whore.

These new pictures will surely shock some of our more Puritan residents. From the behind-the-scenes shot published early online, they're not that crazy.

That is, there are no Janet Jackson-esque style wardrobe malfunctions.

For one, Cyrus was posing for renowned photographer Annie Leibovitz, and there was surely pressure to push the envelope a little bit. They are in the business of selling magazines, after all.

But Cyrus also has the pressure to stay relevant to her fans. She cannot be a little girl forever. Her fans are getting older every day, too. And that wholesome image loses traction over time.

Britney got breast augmentation before she was legal. These pictures hardly cross that line.

Perhaps they show the evolution of a young woman.

The public opinion backlash will be interesting to watch.

TV Keys Happiness; World End Surely Near

From Gallup's: TV Ownership May Be Good for Well-Being: Benefits of TV ownership largely independent of income

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- In most countries the world over, Gallup data show that people who have televisions in their homes report greater well-being than do those who do not have televisions in their homes.

When asked where they currently stand on a "ladder" scale on which "0" indicates the worst possible life and "10" indicates the best possible life, people with televisions in their homes report mean scores about one step higher than those without televisions report. Relative to people living in households without televisions, those with televisions also say they are more optimistic about their futures.

...

The beneficial effects of owning a TV hold up even after taking into account many of the desirable things that often go hand in hand with TV ownership, including wealth and access to electricity and running water. Even when comparing people with identical incomes, TV owners still enjoy higher levels of well-being and optimism. That is, in country after country, when equating TV owners and non-owners for income, TV owners still felt better about their current lives and their likely futures.

Really, I have not much to say here. Although Gallup used control variables, I am sure that they failed to measure all of the relevant possible confounding variables.

Nonetheless, this kind of makes me sad in my heart.

Media Consumer: Pro$titution over Politics

UPDATE 4:56 p.m.: The New York Post and New York Daily News have slightly obscured photos sans top. I cannot imagine their page load traffic.

From The New York Post:"Meanwhile, her MySpace page was among the Web's most viewed yesterday, with 5 million hits in less than 18 hours."

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I am sorry to inform you, dear public opinion scholar, that people just do not care about what you care about.

You care about super delegates.

They care about super-sized Kirstie Alley.

You care about the Middle East.

They care about Jessica Simpson's midriff.

So, when you study public opinion, you're just missing the point.

Do your poll. Ask people about Clinton and Obama. Then ask people about Angelina Jolie and Paris Hilton. Where do the opinions rest?

This was never more clear that this week when the head of the executive branch of a large northeastern state was taken down by a penchant for paid intimate services.

I'm being purposefully vague here lest the search engines lead hundreds of degenerates here in search of JPEGs.

Anyway, this young woman is everywhere I look on the Internet. People are fascinated with this woman. Sure, a lot of the interest is prurient. But these readers and viewers have opinions. Yet ask them whether they have opinions about the protests in Tibet.

"What protests?" you will likely hear.

You Are Not How Much You Make

There's somethin' wrong with the world today
I don't know what it is
Something's wrong with our eyes

We're seeing things in a different way
And God knows it ain't His
It sure ain't no surprise

We're livin' on the edge

- Aerosmith, Living on the Edge

The New York Times has an interesting story on the status of traditional professions, such as medicine and law. If you read between the lines, however, the story is more interesting.

You're more than your job. But take a moment to read the subtexts of status and money. These are powerful themes that have entered the public consciousness, and we seldom stop to question them.

Here's my favorite quotation:

Many young associates, she added, spent their lunch hours making lavish purchases on NeimanMarcus.com, just to remind themselves that what they did counted for something.

This is simply brilliant, and it captures everything in a nutshell. You're an attorney, and all this work counts for something because you can shop at Neiman Marcus. Brilliant!

We Love You Brand, But I Love Rival More

As I was speeding out of town two weeks ago to visit the Buchanan&associates advertising agency in Dublin, Ohio, I ran some quick analyses on our brand physiology data.

In this study, we measured psychophysiological responses to brand logos. In previous studies, we had found that self-reported responses to brands look a lot like self-reported responses to other emotional stimuli.

Admittedly, the early August analyses were fast and incomplete. But some of the results looked weird to me.

This first round of analyses compared physiological responses to the most-loved brands and the least-loved brands.

Collectively, we had both. There were brands that seemingly everyone loved and those that seemingly everyone did not love.

When I first saw the "weird" data, I had a thought. Maybe, I thought, we have a bit of a groupthink problem. Sure, the aggregate data suggest that the brands are loved. But some of the people among our 54 participants might not have loved those brands.

Let's take a look at that idea. For Texas Tech students, our five most-loved brands were Disney, Starbucks, Google, Dr Pepper, and Target. They stood alone. We called them Lovemarks after Kevin Roberts' term.

But let's look at the results by person. Every brand had a complement. That is, there was another brand roughly in the product category. When comparing attitudes (self-reported answers to 3 scale items), how many people picked the Lovemark? (Ties are excluded).

Disney had 32 fans, but 16 people preferred 20th Century Fox.
Starbucks had 48 fans, but 5 people preferred Maxwell House.
Google had 32 fans, but 11 preferred Yahoo!.
Dr Pepper had 33 fans, but 19 people preferred Coca-Cola.
And finally, Target had 39 fans, but 11 preferred Wal-Mart.

The majority always wins. However, with the exception of no-real-equal Starbucks, there were no runaway landslides.

You see, the group does matter. The herd defines the trail. But the individual matters a lot, too. Just because most of you love something does not mean that I do. I might like it, but perhaps I love a rival more.

We already had planned to measure responses to individual Lovemarks. In fact, it was a driving motivation behind the entire study. These data just confirm that it is the correct strategy.

If data show that a group feels a certain way, then a (quasi) randomly selected individual from that group is likely to feel that way, too. But that participant has lived her or his own life and has unique attitudes. We'll do a lot better if we give that individual some agency in measuring her or his attitudes.

Delusional Quotation: Big Head Barry

A blurry photo of "Big Head" Barry at bat against the Colorado Rockies on May 26, 2007. He grounded out as part of an 0-for-4 performance.

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"This record is not tainted at all. At all. Period," a delusional Bonds said after the game. "You guys can say whatever you want."

Thanks, steroid boy. Thanks for your permission to point out the obvious.

You were on your way to being one of the best baseball players of all time.

Then you saw all of the attention directed at the also-likely-steroid-fueled attention directed toward Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa.

Then you turned to the needle. Or "cream." Or "clear."

That was some flaxseed oil, BALCO Barry.

I've plotted Bonds' annual home run production versus his running average. Clearly, he was getting better as time marched on. Then something changed.

See if you can spot where the "Game of Shadows" began.

Girl Power: Working on Four of a Kind

We have a long way to go in terms of gender equity in this country.

In the meantime, I'm doing my part. We found out yesterday that our fourth baby, due in December, will be a girl.

I'm excited. I was pulling for a girl. Really. I'm not lying. I'm not putting on a brave face. I strongly wanted a girl.

There are a lot of reasons why.

It would be remiss not to mention my obsessive-compulsive tendencies. I like things that match. I don't take much joy in "one of these things is not like the others." But that is, honestly, a small part of it.

Allow me to digress and tell you a bit about the conversations that a soon-to-be father of four girls has had over the past decade.

Ten years ago today, we were expecting our first child, which turned out to be a girl.

From the moment I mentioned it, people presumed that I wanted a boy. Really I hadn't given in much thought, and honestly being a pessimist, I wanted only a healthy baby.

But I was instantly amazed at the presumption and how comfortable people were talking about it. It never occurred to them that it might be sexist.

Fast forward two years, and we were expecting the second child. Then it really started. I was amazed how many people would say how much they hoped it would be a boy.

There was no modesty about it. No verbal tip-toeing. Just flat out, "You must really want a boy." Then looks of pity when I told them we were looking at two of a kind.

Three years later, with girl 3.0, it was even worse. Perhaps for this reason if no other, I decided that I really wanted that baby to be a girl. And she was. And she's great. They're all great.

So when my wife became convinced that we had to have a fourth baby (something about even numbers and ancient Pagan rituals), there was no question what I wanted: girl!

Yesterday we found out: girl! I'm happy. But I am saddened by how many people feel badly for me. So when I tell people, I have taken to this somewhat preemptive storytelling style such that I will not have to hear the same pro-boy comments that I have heard for a decade now.

I feel like the bizarre Seinfeld episode about denying being gay:

"Congratulations on another girl, not that there's anything wrong with that."

I'm really not doing it justice here. But if I get one more "you poor bastard" look shot at me, I might have to burn someone's bra.

And, oh yeah. Four kids later, and I still get to go into public restrooms alone.

GIRL POWER!

The Bimodal Attitude World of Wal-Mart

Numerous surveys have shown that Wal-Mart is the most hated and the most loved company in America.

Some people love Wal-Mart for their cheap prices. Some people hate them for their corporate politics and harsh treatment of employees.

For the advertising practitioner, this split opinion provides an interesting dilemma: how do you keep your "base" happy while courting your detractors?

I offer no solutions here, but I do have what I believe to be an interesting observation.

We ran an experiment this year where we collected physiological responses to advertising brands. Although we're still hard at work analyzing the physiological data, I have peeked at the self-report data.

After we recorded physiological responses to each brand, we asked participants several questions about the brand. Most of these question dealt with how positive or how negative their attitudes were toward the brand.

The histogram shows attitudes toward Wal-Mart for the 54 experimental participants. This is the average of 6 attitude-related questions, and the scales range from 1 to 7. Here 7 would represent the most positive attitude possible.

As you can see from the superimposed normal curve, these data are not normally distributed. Instead they appear to be bimodal. That is, they appear to have two most-frequent responses. Just as surveys suggest, we appear to have a group that loves Wal-Mart, and we appear to have a group that hates Wal-Mart.

In West Texas, the pro-Wal-Mart crowd appears larger, but these data are hardly representative. They are from a convenience sample used for an experiment. Nonetheless, I still find it interesting that the split-attitude trends appears present even with the small non-representative sample.

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See our (small non-representative sample) most-loved and least-loved brands here.

Branded: Love and Hate in West Texas

We continue our work into the cognitive processing of brands in the communication and cognition lab. We're just beginning to analyze the data, but in the interim, I thought that I would bring you the most and least loved brands on the South Plains.

Most Loved Brands
1. Disney
2. Google
3. Starbucks
4. Dr Pepper
5. Target (go figure)

Least Loved Brands
28. McDonald's
29. Citibank
30. Abercrombie & Fitch
31. Camel (cigarettes)
32. Marlboro

Most Arousing (Exciting) Brands
1. 20th Century Fox
2. BMW
3. Bacardi
4. Smirnoff
5. Nike

Least Arousing (Exciting) Brands
28. Dell
29. Microsoft
30. Gap
31. Citibank
32. Maxwell House

Sopranos Fuss Highlights TV's Power

I don't watch the Sopranos. There's no good reason, really. When the series started, I had Showtime rather than HBO. And I was in graduate school, so there was not much spare time for television.

Having several obsessive-compulsive quirks, I usually get on a bandwagon early or I don't get on at all.

Sure, I've seen a few episodes. I understand why the show is both highly rated and critically acclaimed. I just haven't had the time.

Nonetheless, I have followed the saga of the show's ending closely and with great interest.

I have a high need for closure. As someone who did not watch the show, I think the open-ended ending was brilliant. If I had been a viewer, I probably would be angry.

But the debate (more than 80,000 people logged in to vote on an ESPN Radio poll) captures why I study television: stories fascinate me.

As I have indicated before, I never set out to study narrative. If I had continued my early methodology of showing television in 30-second clips, I might never have gotten it.

But I started showing entire episodes. For my dissertation (and subsequent work), participants watched an entire episode of ER. And I watched them watching.

The story draws you in. When participants find out that they will be watching ER, some are happy and some are annoyed. One young lady did a little dance.

Once the story starts, however, they get reeled in. We like stories. Homer figured this out several hundred years ago. And it fascinates me today that we're still so hooked on these stories.
Indeed, many old women call soap operas their "stories."

And since we were children, we were taught that stories have endings. We seem to get mad when that's violated, even though it's not so life-like.

There's no definitive answer about the Sopranos. The ESPN Radio vote was 50.8% in favor of the ending and 49.2% against. You cannot get much more split than that.

In the end, creator David Chase wrote the series ending that lets the story live on.

This seems more appropriate in a drama than a situation comedy, where we beg for closure. Just a few days ago, I asked my wife, "Did Ross and Rachel end up getting back together in the Friends finale?"

Much Ado About Nothing ... Paris

Why in the world do we care about Paris Hilton?

I love that it has become "campy" to track her jail tribulations. The faculty of the college of mass communications now routinely send e-mail updates, and they plaster news all over Facebook.

It may be satire, but we're following her every move nonetheless.

I am a bit embarrassed.

We Have Lost Sight of Free Expression

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black once said, "No law means no law."

The words "no law" seem rather straightforward and impossible to confuse, but in the history of the court, only Justice William O. Douglas routinely joined Black in this literal interpretation.

It's easy to defend the speech of those with whom we agree, and it's difficult to defend the speech of those with whom we most vehemently disagree. But this country is far poorer when we fail to do so.

But too often these days, we seem to fail to do so.

Political Orientation Affects Perceptions for All

Recently, my lab has been investigating the cognitive processes underlying the cultivation effect.

In a nutshell, this effect shows that people who watch a lot of television give higher estimates of crime prevalence (among other things).

In our data, political orientation is turning out to have a much greater effect. This perhaps is not surprising due to the conservative nature of Texas Tech Students.

One of the qualifiers of the cultivation effect is so-called mainstreaming.

That is, the television portrayal of the social world tends to most strongly affect social perceptions of those with views far from the mainstream. In this line, heavy TV viewing has been shown to bring them into the mainstream.

In this figure that I presented at our brown bag luncheon yesterday, we see little evidence of mainstreaming on crime perceptions. Instead, after statistically controlling for age, sex, income, GPA, and need for cognition, we see little effect of TV across the three political orientations. Nonetheless, the strong main effect of political orientation persists.

In Sports, Life We Cannot Be Impartial

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I am fascinated by ESPN.com's SportsNation polls.

I seldom voted in online polls until I realized that you can see a state-by-state breakdown after you vote.

Now I vote in every single poll. And the results are always the same: Voters cannot be objective about their sports teams.

Even if you know nothing about college sports, I bet you can identify the states with schools in the Big Ten, Big 12, and Pac-10.

The correlation is not perfect. Iowa has both a Big Ten and a Big 12 school. The Big Ten school is bigger, and the state tipped that way.

The neutral states of the Mountain Time Zone sided with the ACC, as did Southeasten Conference and Big East Conference states.

Utah, Idaho, Nevada, and Hawaii stayed "regional" in the west with the Pac-10.

Colorado -- whose Buffaloes are in last place in the Big 12 -- defected and sided with the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Pennsylvania -- whose population base is on the east coast and whose Nittany Lions are in last place -- shunned the Big Ten in favor of the ACC.

Best is a subjective thing in sports. We always see the bad calls made against our teams and minimize those that go our way. More often than not, the better team wins. But not always ... and especially not in sports such as football and college basketball where you are one-and-done in the post-season.

If we are to believe the 224,076 voters at the time that I took this screen shot, the ACC is best, followed by the Big Ten, Pac-10, and Big 12.

Looking at a more objective measure, the so-called conference RPI (ratings percentage index), the standings look as such:

Conference W/L PCT RPI
1 Atlantic Coast Conference 132-33 .800 .5861
2 Southeastern Conference 127-38 .770 .5851
3 Pac 10 Conference 90-26 .776 .5733
4 Big Ten Conference 116-38 .753 .5730
5 Big East Conference 159-54 .746 .5615
6 Missouri Valley Conference 79-32 .712 .5597
7 Big XII Conference 119-40 .748 .5593

According to the RPI, ESPN.com picked the wrong teams altogether. My beloved Big XII, apparently, deserved to be at the bottom of the pile. But it looks that population of the respective states undeservedly carried the Big Ten above the Pac-10.

This will fuel the fire of SEC fans who claim that an unfair bias in Bristol, Conn., keeps their conference from getting proper respect on ESPN and ABC sports.

Passionate fans. That's one of the reasons that I love sports. I do not make the mistake of talking politics at work, but I can talk sports every day. We can argue about the best teams without the hatred that is now an inseparable part of politics.

Now I've got to get back to celebrating. My childhood team, Kansas; my master's alma mater, Kansas State; my doctoral alma mater, Indiana; and current employer, Texas Tech, all won yesterday! Sadly my New Mexico State Aggies fell short in an upset of Top 10 Nevada.

Science Publishing: Ideas or Dollars?

Myriad problems plague the academic publishing model. Quantifying success with numerical indicators encourages scholars to publish for publishing's sake.

Likewise, publishing in academic journals is prized far more than books or book chapters. In no small irony for faculty researchers, publishers make money on journals. Researchers can only make money from books and book chapters, which are less valued.

Reading the Chronicle of Higher Education, I ran across this article.

Publishers' Group Reportedly Hires P.R. Firm to Counter Push for Free Access to Research Results
By SUSAN BROWN
The Association of American Publishers has hired a public-relations firm with a hard-hitting reputation to counter the open-access publishing movement, which campaigns for scientific results to be made freely available to the public, the journal Nature reported on Wednesday.

The firm, Dezenhall Resources, designs aggressive public-relations campaigns to counter activist groups, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, a nonprofit organization that monitors the public-relations business.

That's right. Hire an attack dog to tackle those radicals suggesting that science -- of all things -- should be about ideas rather than profits.

A few minutes later, I saw that my former colleague Matt Nisbet also wrote about high priced journal subscriptions today. Nisbet references an excellent article in the Washington Post titled, "Publishing Group Hires 'Pit Bull of PR."

Shameless Plug for Icerocket

In part, this Weblog is the continuation of a stimulus-response research project that started when I wrote a weekly column for the New Mexico State University student newspaper, the Round Up.

It never ceased to surprise me what topics stuck a cord with people, and how people interpreted my words.

That continues here with the things that I hear from colleagues and from comments, which I enjoy.

Recently I wrote about the creepy Redenbacher popcorn ads and the response to them on the Web. To illustrate the buzz on Weblogs, I included a trend search from uber-cool company, Icerocket.com.

Those posts have funneled dozens of people to this Weblog. And the amusing part is that Statcounter.com keeps the search terms people use to find this Weblog. Not surprisingly, people got here by Googling "Redenbacher" and some negative adjective. This means that people thought the ads were bad, and they wanted to see who else did.

But the tangential mention of Icerocket.com led to a surprise. It led to a comment by Blake Rhodes, of Icerocket.com. He said thanks for using and suggested a new tool they have. So I Googled the guy's name.

He's the bleepin' CEO. Wow.

Now that's how you run a company based upon Blogs. You check out what people are saying about you. You monitor the buzz.

Good show, Mr. Rhodes. I wish I had some money to invest in Icerocket. With this kind of attention to detail, good things are sure to come.

So, dear reader, please accept my shameless plug for Icerocket.com. It's a super cool tool, and you can lose a few hours just playing with the trend tool.

As a media consumer, Icerocket is cool. As a media scholar, I think it is a powerful tool for understanding this new medium.