Behind The Rhetoric

Our research on optimism looks at how people explain what happens to them, particularly setbacks. If the causal explanation entails factors that are long-lasting or stable ("it's going to last forever"), then they will have a chronic negative reaction to the events. If the cause is pervasive in its effects or global ("it's going to undermine everything"), then subsequent negative reactions will appear in a variety of areas. Finally, if the attributed cause is internal ("it's all my fault"), then the person's self-esteem will presumably drop following bad events. In contrast, optimistic explanations of bad events implicate circumscribed and external causes, and they make someone resilient in the wake or bad events.

The CAVE technique (Content Analysis of Verbatim Explanations) has proven useful in studies of individuals too elusive for conventional psychological study, including political and military leaders. To better understand the upcoming election, we have "CAVEd" causal expressions from Presidential candidates George W. Bush and Albert Gore. We worked with verbatim transcripts of speeches and interviews on talk shows, focusing on interviews conducted by seasoned interviewers like Larry King, Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer and Jim Lehrer, all of whom have a reputation for getting past scripted answers. The dates of the interviews spanned a number of years, and in each case included some conducted before either individual was a candidate for president; they ranged from personal to international.

For each candidate, we had about 10 speeches or interviews, representing a total of more than 120,006 words. In these pages, we located bad events involving either Bush or Gore making causal explanations, identifiable by the use of phrases like "because," "due to," "as a result of," and so on. There were 72 event-explanation units for Bush and 70 for Gore which we each rated, independently, on 7-point scales according to its stability (e.g., "That's who I am") versus instability (e.g., "It was a partisan effort...by the Congress to remove him [President Clinton] from office"); globality (e.g., "A culture that seems to have undermined family and respect") versus specificity (e.g., "There's an editor...that writes for one OF those slick news magazines that's a Bill Clinton advisor"); and internality (e.g., "1 made mistakes") versus externality (e.g., "This is a military that's got very little morale"). The higher number corresponded with more optimism (unstable, specific and external).

We decided to rate some additional characteristics of the causal explanations. The explanations varied dramatically in terms OF vagueness, which we believe is significant because concrete explanations are verifiable and vague ones are not. Some causal explanations pointed to concrete causes (e.g., "the number of chlorine atoms in every part of the earth's atmosphere"), whereas others were diffuse (e.g., "evil remains").

We also rated each explanation in terms of its level of spin. For example, Gore explained his raising of campaign funds by telephone calls from his office by saying "my counsel tolls me there is no controlling legal authority that says there was any violations of the law." Bush explained his infamous smirk, saving, "I'm man who takes myself lightly at times." We don't know the full psychological significance of spin, but we do know that it's unattractive. In a recent study, we found that companies that spun bad events in their reports to stockholders had lower stock prices the following year. Presumably, the general public can detect spin and finds the phenomenon suspect.

For both vagueness and spin, we again used 7-point scales, where 7 signifies extreme vagueness and extreme spin, and 1 means concreteness and no spin.

A final characteristic we coded was the cognitive complexity of the cause: how many different perspectives are brought to bear in the account. We used a 5-point scale for this rating, where 1 means only a single perspective was introduced (e.g., "lousy journalism") and 3 means that several perspectives were used (e.g., "I liked the wry it [alcohol] tasted...it was an escape...I might have used it as a crutch"). A rating of 5, which we almost never assigned, means that the several perspectives were integrated into a coherent whole. Previous researchers have found that political leaders who score high in cognitive complexity are less likely to make impulsive and aggressive decisions and are more likely to compromise.