Verified by 
...I don't wear a pointy black hat, I don't have a big hooked nose with a wart on it, I don't cackle when I laugh, I don't brew potions in my caldron, I do not float when tossed into water, and I definitely do not ride a broomstick -- not even on Halloween.
Well, I'm so glad we cleared that up.
By now, I'm sure you know exactly why I'm saying all of this. You can only imagine me as being all those things that I'm saying I'm not. This is precisely why Christine O'Donnell's recent political ad in her bid as Senator of Delaware was so strange. In it, she opens with "I am not a witch." She concludes with "I am You." Pundits have lampooned the ad, suggesting that it will only make people think of her as a witch.
But she does have accusations of being a witch hanging over her head that must be addressed somehow. After all, she did say the following in the 1990s on Bill Maher's TV show "Politically Incorrect":
"I dabbled into witchcraft -- I never joined a coven. But I did, I did. I dabbled into witchcraft. I hung around people who were doing these things. I'm not making this stuff up. I know what they told me they do," she said.
"One of my first dates with a witch was on a satanic altar, and I didn't know it. I mean, there's little blood there and stuff like that," she said. "We went to a movie and then had a midnight picnic on a satanic altar." --Christine O'Donnell.
What should she do about these confessions? Once you read what she said, it seems like she has to deny any notion that she might be a witch.
In a fascinating, relevant recent study, researchers presented people with both the affirmative and the negative of a given situation [1]. One example was "this lawyer is a shark" or "this lawyer is not a shark." It turns out that both the negative and the affirmative made the participants immediately think of the affirmative: "this lawyer is a shark." This part of the study sounds like bad news for Ms. O'Donnell's ad campaign: People watching that ad will immediately think of her as a witch.
However, when the researchers assessed participants' thoughts after a little more time had passed, the affirmative statements continued to make participants think of the affirmative, but the negative statements no longer did so. Extending these results to the ad, we might expect that some time after people view the ad, they will no longer think of Ms. O'Donnell as a witch. So maybe her political advisors weren't so dumb after all.
Reference
1. Hasson, Uri, & Glucksberg, S.(2006). Does understanding negation entail affirmation? An examination of negated metaphors. Journal of Pragmatics, 38, 1015-1032.
Image credits:
Christine O'Donnell image: jezebel.com
witch image: thefastertimes.com
