Did Governor Palin's
personality change over the past two weeks? Consider the apparent differnce between her interview with Katie Couric and her performance in the Vice Presidential Debate...
Governor Palin participated in an interview with Katie Couric of CBS News that was aired September 29th and that was regarded as problematic by many of her supporters: Palin seemed unwilling or unable to give an example of the newspapers or magazines she read. She also seemed unwilling or unable to cite a US Supreme Court decision aside from Roe vs. Wade with which she disagreed. She often appeared unprepared for the questions in general.
Thursday October 2nd, a week after her interview was broadcast, she debated Senator Joe Biden on national television. In contrast to her interview with Couric, Palin engaged in a fluent and energetic performance. Are there lessons to draw from the apparent change in her personality?
I believe there are two lessons taught by the change in her performance. The first has to do with personality change, and the second, with how we perceive others.
The first lesson is that certain aspects of an individual's personality - particularly the things he or she knows - can change quickly and dramatically.
Journalists reported that, after John McCain selected Palin as his Vice Presidential running mate, his staff began tutoring her in the sorts of campaign issues and events a vice presidential candidate needs to know.
As anyone who has crammed for a test can tell you, you can learn a lot in a few days. Whatever Palin's progress had been through the time of the Couric interview, she was able to continue learning thereafter. Such efforts can turn a person from seemingly ill-informed to far more knowledgeable in just a few days. (Note to students: The problem with cramming is that you forget what you learn far more quickly than if you study in shorter intervals over longer periods of time, especially if you don't return to refresh the material in memory afterward).
The second relevant lesson regarding reading personality is that when observing personality, it is crucial to take context into account. Some contexts favor some perceptions over others.
In the interview situation, Katie Couric (and her staff) could prepare questions ahead of time and make them as challenging as they cared to. When questioners ask challenging questions, those who are in the position of answering them often look less smart in comparison to the questionner.
There are parallels here to a 1977 report in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In the study, psychologists assigned research participants to the roles of questioner and answerer ("contestant") in what they characterized as a quiz-game simulation.
In that study, the questioner then made up 10 difficult questions - to which she knew the answers - to pose to the contestant. This social interaction loosely approximates Katie Couric's interview of Sarah Palin in that Governor Palin had to answer questions without knowing what she would be asked. (There also were some differences: some of the questions Couric asked, such as those concerning Palin's preferred newspaper and magazine-reading, had answers known only to Palin, her friends, and her associates).
In the 1977 study, another group participants watched the question-and-answer interaction. Those observers concluded that the questioners (who knew the answers to their own questions) were generally smarter than the answerers. In fact, students in both the questioner and contestent/answerer roles were of equal ability: they had been randomly assigned to their roles. The qustioner-answerer set-up, in other words, puts the answerer (and, similarly, could put interview subjects) at a disadvantage.
The bottom line is that when hard-to-answer questions are involved, impartial observers will tend to judge the questioner as smarter than the respondent, even when that is not necessarily the case.
When evaluating another person's knowledge as revealed in an interview, it is worthwhile considering this situational effect -- and yet I suspect it is a bias that few people know about and even fewer think about. All too often, we disregard powerful situational issues when trying to read another individual's personality.
Personality represent's a person's overall psychological functioning; it is a person's overall system of mental energy, knowledge, social action and self-control. As we watched Governor Palin over the past two weeks, and tried to get to know her better, we were evaluating her overall personality.
Palin's apparent change occurred for at least two reasons: Palin herself improved her knowledge of key political issues, and the context in which she acted changed: from an interview to a debate in which perceivers would be apt to evaluate her in a relatively neutral fashion.
An observer of personality, having perceived all this, needs to evaluate Palin's expertise in context, and after having done so, needs to consider her performance in relation to other candidates and elected officials in similar positions. Next, the perceiver needs to combine those impressions of her personality with the other relevant factors involved (political outlook and viewpoint, specific positions on issues) before deciding how to vote.
Returning to judgments of personality itself: evaluating someone's knowledge and mental abilities requires more expertise than may first be apparent. One must take into account the individual's mastery of the subject area; to do so, one must know something about the area oneself. In addition, the evaluator must consider the context in which the person is being judged (and know something of the biases a given context can elicit).
There are, I supsect, many other lessons in reading personality evident in the change in Governor Palin over the past few weeks. If you have some thoughts on these, please share them in your comments on this post.
Addendum: The 1977 study mentioned above was carried about by Lee Ross, Theresa Amabile, and Julia Steinmetz and published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. This post was edited slightly for readibility on Oct. 19th 2008.
© Copyright 2008 John D. Mayer
