Brendan Nyhan

Via the New York Times, Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) is using some slick spin to exaggerate the probable effect of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in a statement supporting President Bush’s decision to lift an executive ban on offshore oil drilling:

If we had started exploring ANWR 10 years ago when President Clinton vetoed it, and coupled it with a comprehensive energy plan, we wouldn’t be in this predicament today. But now the chickens have come home to roost. We can afford to wait no longer.

Even if ANWR were fully online today, however, it would only support a small percentage of US oil consumption, which means it would have a negligible effect on the price of oil in global markets. The way Voinovich gets around this inconvenient fact is by adding that if we had “coupled [opening ANWR] with a comprehensive energy plan, we wouldn’t be in this predicament today.” But that’s like saying “If I had saved $10 more in the fifth grade, and also invested all of my savings in Google stock, I’d be a millionaire today.”

TNR’s Isaac Chotiner wonders whether the Obama campaign should have objected to this New Yorker cover depicting Barack Obama as a Muslim and his wife as a black radical, which was intended to satirize conservative propaganda about the couple:

What I do not understand, however, is why the Obama campaign has chosen to pick a fight with the magazine, thereby assuring that the story will have legs…

[W]hy make a stink at all? As a colleague put it to me in an email:

“No one would have even noticed it–certainly no one in the right-wing nut-o-sphere–if they’d just kept their mouths shut. Now we’re going to get all this protest-too-much commentary…”

Indeed.

As always, the dilemma is whether to (a) try to correct the misperception and any information that reinforces it, which risks drawing more attention to the idea, or (b) ignore it and hope it goes away. At Spinsanity, we chose the first option with the hope that we could shame elites into not spreading the myths. After some indecision, the Obama campaign campaign has made the same choice, even launching a fact-checking website called Fight the Smears. Its response to the New Yorker cover, which may reinforce misperceptions about Obama, can be seen in the same light.

The problem, however, is that corrections are often ineffective and can even strengthen myths and misperceptions in some circumstances.

Here’s what I found in joint research with Jason Reifler:

An extensive literature addresses citizen ignorance, but very little research focuses on misperceptions. Can these false or unsubstantiated beliefs about politics be corrected?
Previous studies have not tested the efficacy of corrections in a realistic format. We
conducted four experiments in which subjects read mock news articles that included
either a misleading claim from a politician, or a misleading claim and a correction.
Results indicate that corrections frequently fail to reduce misperceptions among the
targeted ideological group. We also document several instances of a “backfire” effect in
which corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group in question.

Research by other scholars is similarly pessimistic:

[A] new experiment by Kimberlee Weaver at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and others shows that hearing the same thing over and over again from one source can have the same effect as hearing that thing from many different people — the brain gets tricked into thinking it has heard a piece of information from multiple, independent sources, even when it has not. Weaver’s study was published this year in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The experiments by Weaver, Schwarz and others illustrate another basic property of the mind — it is not good at remembering when and where a person first learned something. People are not good at keeping track of which information came from credible sources and which came from less trustworthy ones, or even remembering that some information came from the same untrustworthy source over and over again. Even if a person recognizes which sources are credible and which are not, repeated assertions and denials can have the effect of making the information more accessible in memory and thereby making it feel true, said Schwarz.

Experiments by Ruth Mayo, a cognitive social psychologist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, also found that for a substantial chunk of people, the “negation tag” of a denial falls off with time. Mayo’s findings were published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2004.

“If someone says, ‘I did not harass her,’ I associate the idea of harassment with this person,” said Mayo, explaining why people who are accused of something but are later proved innocent find their reputations remain tarnished. “Even if he is innocent, this is what is activated when I hear this person’s name again.

“If you think 9/11 and Iraq, this is your association, this is what comes in your mind,” she added. “Even if you say it is not true, you will eventually have this connection with Saddam Hussein and 9/11.”

Mayo found that rather than deny a false claim, it is better to make a completely new assertion that makes no reference to the original myth. Rather than say, as Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) recently did during a marathon congressional debate, that “Saddam Hussein did not attack the United States; Osama bin Laden did,” Mayo said it would be better to say something like, “Osama bin Laden was the only person responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks” — and not mention Hussein at all…

So is silence the best way to deal with myths? Unfortunately, the answer to that question also seems to be no.

Another recent study found that when accusations or assertions are met with silence, they are more likely to feel true, said Peter Kim, an organizational psychologist at the University of Southern California. He published his study in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

I’m still hopeful that shaming elites is worth the potential risk of reinforcing the misperception, but Obama’s strategy may not work. It’s an almost impossible strategic dilemma.

In All the President’s Spin, we wrote about how liberals were increasingly adopting conservative tactics. The latest example: Josh Marshall saying the “Associated Press officially endorses McCain” (to which he added “Well, pretty much”) for running a negative story about Barack Obama.

The article itself is less than ideal — it’s an example of the genre of campaign story in which the reporter says one candidate is “dogged” by accusations and then repeats all of them in a less-than-critical way, implicitly giving credence to them. But surely there’s a more constructive response than suggesting the AP is biased against Obama, which apes the standard conservative tactic of blaming all negative stories on liberal media bias.

It seems increasingly clear that the post-Cold War/pre-9/11 era (1991-2001) will be seen by historians the way the 1920s are today — a time of decadence in which gathering domestic and foreign threats were neglected or ignored altogether. I was reminded of this by a New York Times article titled “American Energy Policy, Asleep at the Spigot”, but the list of policy failures also includes global warming, health care, and terrorism at a minimum.

Drudge is currently featuring a Rasmussen Reports poll with the headline “Poll: All tied up”. But there’s no particular reason to give that much credence to the Rasmussen poll, which shows the candidates tied at 46% (including leaners). The filtered poll averages of Wisconsin’s Charles Franklin at Pollster.com and UNC’s Jim Stimson still show Obama with a 3-4 point lead, though both have him trending downward (which is consistent with research suggesting that anti-incumbent sentiment is higher six months before Election Day than it is in November).

At the macro level, the most recent forecasts from Ray Fair and Douglas Hibbs (IE only), who both have well-known models of presidential election outcomes, predict Obama will get 52% of the two-party vote, while a less credible model from a random economic forecasting firm reportedly predicts an Obama win by more than 10 points. Meanwhile, Intrade currently projects the likelihood of an Obama win at 65%, which I think is a reasonable number.

A few days ago, I heard Sean Hannity shout down a caller with the claim that Barack Obama was going to raise taxes on everyone by allowing all of President Bush’s tax cuts to expire. Thankfully, Media Matters got the transcript:

HANNITY: You’ve raised a lot of good points here, Katie. Dallas, is there, is there anything that you could point to where he’s going to lower gas prices? Do you support his economic plan of raising taxes?

CALLER 1: Well that — that —

HANNITY: Do you support his — do you support his earlier position of a pull out of Iraq in 16 months? Do you support that?

CALLER 1: OK, well, first, that’s actually not accurate —

HANNITY: What’s not accurate?

CALLER 1: He’s not going to raise taxes for everybody. Some people —

HANNITY: Well no, actually he is. He’s raising —

CALLER 1: People like — people like myself and in the middle class, our taxes won’t be raised.

HANNITY: Sir —

CALLER 1: And that’s factual.

HANNITY: — sir, for — no, that’s not factual, because the Bush tax cuts are going to expire, and when they expire, families of four that make $50,000 a year are going to be paying another $2,000 in taxes a year. So by letting those tax cuts expire, that’s a tax increase by any definition.

CALLER 1: That’s — that’s — that’s a misnomer. You’re not representing his position properly.

HANNITY: All right, listen, I can’t — I can’t argue — listen –

CALLER 1: He’s going to raise taxes for the —

HANNITY: Dallas, I’m not going to argue with you. It is a fact. He is for rescinding the Bush tax cuts —

CALLER 1: That’s not true. You’re lying — you’re not being —

HANNITY: — and letting them expire. All right, well, anyway, thanks for the call. Katie, thank you, appreciate it, appreciate you being with us, 800-941-SEAN is our toll-free telephone number.

This is a blatant falsehood. Obama’s plan would raise taxes on high-income Americans but he would actually reduce income taxes for Americans earning less than $75,000 per year.

I’m leaving Durham after EITM for the summer meeting of the Society for Political Methodology. Regular blogging will return soon now that my conference poster is finished…

It’s strange to me that so many bloggers write vague titles for their posts (random examples from my RSS reader: “Fantasyland,” “Optimal Control,” “The Catch-22”). Maybe it’s an aesthetic preference, but the reality is that your blog readers are busy people. Most of them are quickly scanning your blog online or (even worse) scrolling through headlines in an RSS reader. Why not tell them what the post is about? More importantly, if you write specific headlines, some of your posts will generate significant downstream traffic from Google, whereas vague headlines won’t.

For more, see Jakob Nielsen’s 1998 column Microcontent: How to Write Headlines, Page Titles, and Subject Lines, which is still exceptionally relevant today.

A Reuters story about the pre-Olympic crackdown on dissent going on in China right now features an especially Orwellian headline:

China announces Olympics stability drive after riot

“[S]tability drive”? What sort of bizarre euphemism is that and why is Reuters using it without scare quotes? (The phrase also appears in the article.) Did they get it from the People’s Daily? I know it’s difficult for journalists to operate in an authoritarian country, but there’s no excuse for parroting official propaganda like this.

Frank Rich asserted Sunday that John McCain adviser Charles Black’s comments to Fortune magazine (which McCain repudiated) weren’t an “improvisational mishap”:

Don’t fault Charles Black, the John McCain adviser, for publicly stating his honest belief that a domestic terrorist attack would be “a big advantage” for their campaign and that Benazir Bhutto’s assassination had “helped” Mr. McCain win the New Hampshire primary.

In private, he is surely gaming this out further, George Carlin-style. What would be the optimum timing, from the campaign’s perspective, for this terrorist attack — before or after the convention? Would the attack be most useful if it took place in a red state, blue state or swing state? How much would it “help” if the next assassinated foreign leader had a higher name recognition in American households than Benazir Bhutto?

Unlike Hillary Clinton’s rumination about the Bobby Kennedy assassination or Barack Obama’s soliloquy about voters clinging to guns and faith, Mr. Black’s remarks were not an improvisational mishap. He gave his quotes on the record to Fortune magazine. He did so without thinking twice because he was merely saying what much of Washington believes.

Even if we grant that the second paragraph is satirical hyperbole, the third paragraph makes a direct claim — that Black’s remarks “were not an improvisational mishap” because he “gave his quotes on the record to Fortune magazine.” In fact, however, the remarks were almost certainly an improvisation — Fortune, not Black, raised the issue of another terrorist attack on the US, as Bob Somerby pointed out (emphasis added):

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December was an “unfortunate event,” says Black. “But his knowledge and ability to talk about it reemphasized that this is the guy who’s ready to be Commander-in-Chief. And it helped us.” As would, Black concedes with startling candor after we raise the issue, another terrorist attack on U.S. soil. “Certainly it would be a big advantage to him,” says Black.

You certainly can’t assert that Black intentionally raised the issue — that is, unless you write novels about politics for a living.