Snakes

Which current Presidential candidate does this resemble?

Answer: All of them.

They all often resemble, or at least behave like, slimy snakes.

Ask a Presidential candidate in either party a simple question and what do you get? You get a pre-packaged answer to another very different question. This is what passes for the discussion of substantive policy issues in the year 2012.

Don’t take my word for it.  Just listen to any journalist ask a candidate a difficult question and watch what happens.  Out comes a slimy non-answer in almost every case.

In a few cases, the candidate may attack the journalist for asking such a despicable question (remember Newt when asked about his extramarital affairs), but usually you get the slime treatment: a smile and a glib answer to a question not asked.

Political consultants train their candidates to do this. They are paid millions because they know more about human psychology and how to manipulate the public than just about anyone else. They teach a kind of political sleight of hand.  Politicians are taught to stay “on message” and keep saying the right buzz words and repeating key concepts over again. Done well this distracts the listener from other issues and questions.

Political consultants call this “reframing” the issue. It is not too different from a magician using the technique known as “misdirection”. The idea is to shift away from an awkward question by responding with something that gets the listeners to pick up on familiar cues. Those cues trigger certain memories which, in turn, are tied into a particular political doctrine.

The use of familiar “buzz words” (e.g. freedom, lower taxes, smaller government, free enterprise, etc.) are critical to an making an unresponsive response effective and powerful. If it works, the audience will erupt in applause, never giving another thought to the original question.[1]

Recent scientific research explains how this works. These new studies asked the question “under what circumstances people are able to get away with dodging a question?”[2]

The researchers had a speaker provide the same answer to three different questions in three different groups. The answer was about health care. One question dealt with health care, one with illegal drug use, and the third with the war on terror.  Each audience was asked to assess the truthfulness of the speaker.

The results of the study, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, showed that the first two audiences thought that the speaker was being truthful, but the third group noticed that the answer was unresponsive.

Scientists conducting the study believe that the drug use question was close enough to the health care question that the audience did not notice the unresponsiveness of  the speaker, but when he got way, way off subject in the third group, it did not work..

The study also showed that almost no one in any group could remember what the original question was. They found that “even if we wanted to pay careful attention to each answer, we …have limited capacity to do so” because we are unable to focus that tightly when taking in a lot of information.

This makes it easy for slimy political snakes to get away with dodging the questions they don’t want to answer.

But when politicians dodge the question, are they lying?

I am going to dodge that question for now and answer it in a future blog.

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[1] For more on how this kind of sleight of hand works, see George Lakoff, “Don’t Think of an Elephant,” Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004.

[2] The description of this study and all of the quoted material is from Todd Rogers, “The Art of the Dodge,” Harvard Magazine, Mar-April 2012.