Nearly everyone can agree that Tina Fey's near-perfect impersonations of Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live have been entertaining. But what pundits cannot seem to agree on is whether these sketches have had, or will have, any impact on voter's perceptions of Palin as a qualified candidate for Vice President. The persuasion research suggests Gov. Palin should be worried.
To understand why, a history lesson is first in order. Whether it is alcohol, candy bars, fast food, fast cars, weight loss supplements, weight gain supplements, or the like, Americans today can hardly sit through an evening of primetime television or the broadcast of a weekend ballgame without viewing myriad commercials advertising the benefits of these potentially harmful projects. But noticeably absent from this list is cigarettes, a product whose advertisements were banned from the airwaves by the U.S. Federal Government over thirty years ago. What seems most perplexing at first about the ban is that the executives of Big Tobacco enthusiastically endorsed the proposed regulation. Why would the chief officers of the tobacco industry be excited not just to curb, but to completely eliminate, the promotion of their products from perhaps their most effective advertising medium? The answer tells us something about the extent to which Ms. Fey's characterization of Palin undermines the candidacy of the Alaskan governor, and more generally how to combat the repeated persuasive message of one's competitors.
Several years prior to the cigarette ban, the Federal Communications Commission had enacted the "fairness doctrine," which ordered radio stations and television networks that broadcasted controversial messages of public importance to also provide free air time to those with opposing views. Anti-tobacco groups capitalized on this ruling by initiating an ad campaign that provided viewers with effective counterarguments that refuted each supposed benefit of cigarettes "demonstrated" in Big Tobacco's commercials. A major reason why these anti-tobacco commercials were so potent was that these ads included recognizable features of the original ads, such as characters, settings, themes, and slogans that had been appearing in cigarette ads at the time. For instance, one commercial featured a Marlboro Man-like cowboy smoking a cigarette in a saloon. When he encounters a rival cowboy and attempts to draw his weapon, he starts wheezing, coughing, and gasping for air. The narrator gravely says, "Cigarettes - they're killers." After viewing counter-ads such as these, those who later viewed other cigarette advertisements-particularly ones featuring the Marlboro man or cowboy scenery-immediately conjured up the counterarguments, increasing their resistance to the cigarette ads' message.
Counter-advertisements such as these proved to be enormously successful; per capita cigarette consumption dropped almost 10 percent in the following three years, most of which has been attributed to the counter-ads. It's not so surprising then, that the industry's leaders decided it would be more profitable to reallocate their advertising budgets to the types of media that the fairness doctrine didn't apply, such as billboards and print ads.
The strategy of embedding a counter-message in the images and catchphrases of a target message has been dubbed the "Poison Parasite" by social psychologist Robert Cialdini because the counterarguments act as poison to the original message, while the parasitic mechanism ensures that the original message will now also "host" these poisonous counterarguments, activating them each time the message is heard or seen. Research on this phenomenon has revealed that the greater the similarity between the original message and the poisonous counter-message, the more potent the undermining effect.
Countless politicians have been caricatured on Saturday Night Live, but Ms. Fey's uncanny resemblance and dead-on impersonation of Gov. Palin, in addition to her ability to co-opt and ridicule many of Gov. Palin's standard phrases or keywords, should have a potent and far-reaching effect on voters. Her portrayal of Gov. Palin as a question-avoiding and "mavericky" know-nothing will no longer solely be available to potential voters on Saturday nights. Rather, as a parasite that has infected the Alaskan Maverick, it will be called to mind every time Sarah Palin speaks.
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Noah Goldstein is a faculty member at UCLA Anderson School of Management. He is also co-author of the New York Times best-seller, Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive, with Robert Cialdini and Steve Martin.
