Tepper School study reveals voter moral justifications for politicians' misstatements
In a new study, researchers used online surveys conducted primarily when Donald Trump was president to show that both Republican and Democratic voters provided explicit moral justification for politicians’ statements that were factually inaccurate, especially when they aligned with their personal politics.
The study was conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, Rice University, the University of Colorado-Boulder, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is in press at the American Journal of Sociology.
“What we found is that political misinformation isn't just about whether voters can tell facts from fiction,” said Oliver Hahl, associate professor of organization theory, strategy, and entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business, who coauthored the study. “It seems like it's more about how statements, whether true or not, speak to a broader political agenda.”
Researchers conducted six surveys to gauge voters’ responses to statements by politicians that flouted the norm of fact-grounding (i.e., that one should stick to facts when giving a statement) while proclaiming deeper, socially divisive “truths.” Five were conducted during Trump’s presidency and one was conducted in the spring of 2023. Participants were recruited from either Amazon’s Cloud Research Platform, a crowd-sourcing platform that assists people with virtual tasks, or Prolific, a research platform that provides academics and companies access to participants for studies and surveys.
All six surveys had similar structures and questions, though some questions were specific to a particular political context. Each survey gauged voters’ reactions to false statements by politicians, including Trump, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, President Joe Biden, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.
The results of all the surveys showed a significant tendency by partisans to deliberately support violations of the norm of fact-grounding, justifying these factually inaccurate statements in moral terms when they could have relied on a factual justification. The surveys also provided consistent evidence that voters distinguish between objective evidence and truth, favoring the latter when judging statements of favored politicians and the former when judging disfavored candidates.
Importantly, results from the last two surveys indicated significant moral flexibility among both Democrats and Republicans.
The results challenge the common belief that partisan voters' positive reactions to misinformation from their party leaders are solely because of laziness or bias leading them to confuse factually inaccurate information for truth. Instead, the evidence consistently shows that voters are flexible with the facts – exhibiting factual flexibility.
Yet they also provide consistent evidence of moral flexibility, whereby voters justify demagogic fact-flouting, or disregarding or ignoring facts, as an effective way of proclaiming a deeply resonant political “truth.” A key implication is that political misinformation cannot be eliminated by getting voters to distinguish fact from fiction; voters’ moral orientations may be such that they prefer fact-flouting.
In most studies, Trump supporters showed considerable flexibility with the facts regarding his statements. However, the study focusing on the “big lie,” which surveyed only those who voted for Trump in 2016, proved to be an exception.
Conducted in 2021, the survey explored voters’ responses to Trump’s claims that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was “rigged” or “stolen.” Participants were more likely to consider Trump’s allegations as grounded in objective evidence rather than subjective viewpoints.
Compared to other topics, Trump’s allegations that the election was stolen were portrayed as factual. There is less moral flexibility with this issue, possibly because these claims were presented more as facts. However, the emphasis on factual accuracy concerning the big lie still varies based on people’s political affiliations.
Among the limitations of their work, the authors note that the statements used in the surveys represented just one type of political misinformation (demagogic fact-flouting by partisan politicians). In addition, the measurement and analysis strategy used was new and lacked a track record, and the samples were not nationally representative.
“Our findings reiterate the sociological insight that commitment to democratic norms cannot be assumed and indicate the importance of that caution when it comes to the problem of political misinformation,” said Minjae Kim, Assistant Professor of Management at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business, and study coauthor.
“In particular, efforts to combat voters’ positive response to misinformation cannot be limited to teaching them to simply work harder to digest accurate information (e.g., fact-checking).”
JOURNAL
American Journal of Sociology
ARTICLE TITLE
When Truth Trumps Facts: Studies on Partisan Moral Flexibility in American Politics
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
29-Apr-2024
It’s all in the smile: Aston University-led research finds politicians can influence voters with facial expressions
ASTON UNIVERSITY
- Dr Carl Senior identified two types of smile – affiliative and reward – given by political leaders during the last UK general election in 2019
- The eventual winner, Boris Johnson, was found to display the affiliative smile, which acts to align voter behaviour
- The study is the first to look at how supporters of election losers react to the eventual winner.
New research led by Aston University’s Dr Carl Senior has found that the type of smile used by a political leader can influence voters to support them and their political agenda.
There are many different types of smile, and the researchers, which also included Professor Patrick Stewart from the University of Arkansas, US, Professor Erik Bucy from Texas Tech University, US, and Professor Nick Lee from Warwick Business School at the University of Warwick, UK, focused on two in particular – the ‘reward’ smile and the ‘affiliative’ smile. They used videos from political leaders from the 2019 UK general election, which was won by the Conservative party, then led by Boris Johnson. The Labour party, then led by Jeremy Corbyn, came second. Jo Swinson was the leader of the third-placed Liberal Democrat party.
The ‘reward’ smile is the genuine, or felt smile, associated with joy and enthusiasm. It is the smile most likely to be contagious with onlookers, and has been linked to higher levels of trust. The ‘affiliative’ smile, meanwhile, communicates approachability, acknowledgement, and appeasement. It is associated with an affinity towards the onlooker and is thought to be important for developing cooperative relationships.
The researchers selected volunteers professing to be supporters of each of the three main parties and showed them the same video footage of the three leaders – Johnson, Corbyn and Swinson – before and after the 2019 election. The team assessed the emotional response to the different smiles for the candidates, whether positive (happiness and affinity) or negative (anger and distress).
When shown footage of election winner Johnson’s affiliative smile after the election, people in all groups showed an increase in happiness and affinity compared to when they were shown the footage before the election. Supporters of the losing parties showed an overall decrease in the negative effect. It was only this affiliative smile which was found to act as a mechanism to align voter feelings and behaviour to the dominant, or winning, political message.
The reward smile did not have the same effect. Supporters of Labour showed an increased level of anger and distress when viewing Johnson’s reward smile after the election compared to before it.
The effects for Corbyn and Swinson were less marked, showing that they failed to significantly change voters’ responses to them. Their appeal was somewhat fixed and failed to match Johnson’s charm. Johnson tapped into the voters’ feeling of annoyance about the slow Brexit process with his ‘Get Brexit done’ slogan, while Corbyn’s position was ambiguous. Swinson’s party was pro-Europe but lacked Johnson’s performative abilities to link a strong message to his nonverbal communication.
Previous work by various researchers has shown that observers judge leadership traits and behaviour, or a lack thereof, from non-verbal cues such as facial expressions. However, there has, until now, been little research outside the US on the effect of facial displays on voter behaviour.
Dr Senior said:
“The human smile can convey both rewarding and affiliative social intent and thus has significant utility in politics, where the ability to bond with and reassure voters is vital to electoral success. We are in an unprecedented year as there are numerous elections scheduled to take place across several continents. The outcome of these campaigns will have a significant impact on millions of people across vast geopolitical regions. Given that almost all politicians involved in these election campaigns will make full use of broadcast media to reach voters, it is crucial to understand the effectiveness of their non-verbal displays in shifting voting preference.”
Professor Lee said:
“The individual appeal of party leaders has become increasingly influential. A smile can’t win an election on its own. But Johnson’s personal appeal transcended party policies, connecting with people who hadn’t planned to vote for him.
“The upside for today’s politicians is that charisma is not an innate quality. It can be taught. By paying attention to their facial behaviour and ensuring they display the right smile in the right context, they can still leverage the power of emotional responses. It is something leaders of all organisations can learn.”
The researchers say more work is required to understand how smiles work together with other verbal and nonverbal displays to generate affinity in voters and convey social dominance to other leaders.
PLOS ONE DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0301113
JOURNAL
PLoS ONE
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
People
ARTICLE TITLE
Winners and losers: Emotional shifts across elections are conveyed by a politician’s smile
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
29-Apr-2024
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