Tonight's second McCain/Obama debate just ended, and I've finally reached an important decision. No, I'm not one of the uncommitted Ohio voters who gets to go on TV and become a Warholian celebrity because of my lack of decisiveness. I mean, who knew that the inability to make up one's mind could get you so much national airtime? Really, how long does it take these people to choose what to wear each morning?
No, my decision is a different one. I decided that I'm buying one of those perception analyzer dials so that I can give on-line evaluations of everyone I interact with during the course of my daily activities. What's that you say, my car's going to need a new air filter in addition to the brake fluid and oil filter? Give me a moment, I need to adjust my dial downward. I'm very excited about this idea–I think it's almost as good as the one I had in college, inspired by World Cup soccer games, to start issuing yellow and red cards to my housemates fo behavioral infractions. They seemed to love it when I'd write down their names in my little referee's notebook.
Seriously, who at CNN decided that it isn't good enough to show us a post-debate focus group full of professional vacillators, instead we need to see how other people are reacting to the debate as it's going on? Not only that, but we also need to see how the so-called expert pundits are scoring it while it's still an event in progress.
Now debate spin has been ridiculous for as long as I have followed politics. Ever since I can remember, watching a debate has required a 90 minute investment to sitting through the event itself, followed by another 90 minutes of wading through the expert commentary so that you can find out what the conventional wisdom is going to be regarding who won. But now we don't even have to wait until the debate's over to have other people tell us what to think.
The idea of having these ratings on the screen during the live debate sounds a lot like a social psychological experiment on conformity, doesn't it? Well, that's because it is. In 2007 psychologists published a series of studies conducted at Williams College in which participants watched actual political debates. The main finding? Other people's reactions greatly color how we see debates.
In one study, participants watched an old Reagan/Mondale debate in which Reagan had offered up some of his still-famous one-liners. Students who watched the complete broadcast, including the audience's response to these jokes, were more impressed with Reagan's performance than were those who watched a video with the audience response edited out. Indeed, it seems there's a good reason so many sitcoms air with live audience responses or inserted laugh tracks.
In another study in the paper, several groups of students watched a debate together in various locales. In these different rooms, the researchers planted audience members who were instructed to react loudly and enthusiastically to some of the arguments offered by one of the candidates. Results indicated that participants tended to view the debate performance of a given candidate as stronger when they had watched the debate in a room with vocal supporters of that candidate.
And then in yet another study, the researchers beat CNN to the punch by several years. They had participants watch a debate while seeing on a monitor the purported reactions of other viewers who were supposedly using the very same perception analyzer machine CNN now uses. What did they find? As you'll expect by now, these live ratings, which were actually controlled by the researchers themselves, influenced how viewers saw the debate.
Of course, the big difference is that these researchers were conducting an empirical study, whereas CNN is supposed to be a news channel giving us an unfiltered view of the debate. I have no reason to doubt the motivations of the network–I assume they're just following the trend of trying to one-up their competitors with technological prowess and sheer information overload. I mean, by this point, I'm half convinced that John King can control the ocean tides with his magic touch screens, so this is just another tool in the competitive network effort to wow us.
But it just seems like a Pandora's Box not worth opening. What's to stop a network with an agenda from stacking the deck for their focus group in the effort to steer viewer attitudes in a particular direction? Or from just cutting out the middle man altogether and simply manipulating the data as researchers do in the lab?
The debate commission and respective campaigns seem aware of the potential risks of such social influence. They seem to have read up on their Solomon Asch. After all, they're serious enough about addressing the problem to have muzzled the live audience in each debate hall. So wouldn't it therefore make sense to tell the networks to at least wait until the event is over before they start telling everyone how to think about what they've seen?
While we're on the topic, one final note to the undecided focus group voters of Columbus, Ohio. There's a reason that your expectations for each debate always go unmet. There's a simple explanation for why the candidates never seem to address your personal, idiosyncratic concerns. It's that the TV only works one way–that is, you can see the candidates, but they can't see you. For some of the questions you have regarding their positions, you might have to actually take a few minutes during your lunch break to look up the answers on your own. But then again, once you make up your mind, there goes the blossoming TV career I suppose.
