Who Won Friday's Presidential Debate?
I looked forward to the debate between John McCain and Barak Obama on Friday night. The timing was right and I was able to seat myself in front of the TV just at 9 PM.
I was pleasantly impressed by both candidates' performance...either might become our next president, after all, and although I find myself in less-than-full agreement with either of them, I hope that whoever is chosen will be a competent leader.
But who won?
My perceptions of Barak Obama and John McCain, still not fully formed, are precisely what certain members of their campaigns are hoping to influence. They know that by election day, voters must convert their perceptions into the choice of a single candidate.
Each campaign staff has people responsible for selecting out video moments from the debate to make their own candidate look best, and the other worst. By selectively replaying these moments in advertisements, web videos, and selected quotes of what was said, these staff influence peoples' recall of the debate (among those who watched), and, more generally, the sense of who performed better. In doing this, the campaign staff seek to influence our judgments of their candidates' personalities and strengths, creating an impression to their advantage.
Now, more than ever, I try to attend to what those who try to influence me say. Sometimes a campaign staff member makes a good point about the performance of one or the other candidate. At other times, however, such staffers (and sympathetic commentators) seem to exploit our naïve sense of personality, over-interpreting a candidate's single foolish comment or lapse, suggesting that it means more than it might. Singling out a candidate's one-time comment (except if extremely revealing, or fitting a broader pattern of his or her character) often exaggerates its significance. 
Surely few people on earth always say precisely what they mean and speak in connected meaningful sentences at all times (though just as surely, some are better at this than others). Our own cognition is, in fact, designed to compensate for others' omissions and misstatements, by filling in what we believe they mean. Sometimes we don't even know we are doing so. For example, people often read the text to the right as correct -- even though there is a typographical error in it.
Regarding Friday's debate, no consensus has emerged as to who won, but I will be interested to see whether, by influencing our perceptions of the debate through the clever use of video clips and editing of transcripts, one side will prevail over the other in influencing the public.
Such is the power of political messages that they can swiftly alter our perceptions of the personalities of our leaders. For those who still are deciding who to vote for, the impression made by a candidate can change, ever-so-slightly, due to such clever campaign messages.
Though our first impression might be that a candidate is well-meaning, our attention could be shifted to the fact that he is ill-informed, or if our impression is that the candidate is cynical, we might instead be persuaded that she is perceptive. Such can be the power of videos and other sources to slightly shift our memories and viewpoints, influencing the undecideds and the not-yet-fully committed alike.
At best we can hope to sort the more accurate among the post-debate messages from those that are most misleading, and to favor the accurate.
Do you have any observations on the post-debate messages the campaigns are using to shape our perceptions of who won? If so, please share them in a comment...
© Copyright 2008 John D. Mayer
