In the autumn of 2011, a heated debate on social welfare suddenly flared in Denmark and shifted public opinion on social welfare recipients in a more negative direction. What triggered this reaction? An interview with a single person on social welfare: 'Carina'. Carina was an unemployed single mother who was initially referred to by a left-wing politician as a flesh-and-blood example of the perils experienced by social welfare recipients. The strategy backfired, however, and the right-wing seized on Carina as a clear-cut example of a welfare recipient who is capable of working but chooses not to. In the minds of many, the complex issue of social welfare came to be understood—framed, as it is often phrased—in terms of Carina, and the anger against Carina spilled over to anger against social welfare recipients in general.
The Carina case is merely one of many in which political elites successfully frame and define how citizens think about a political issue. But as the left wing's failure in the Carina case illustrates, elites often also fail to communicate persuasively. Why do some communication attempts from political elites have a powerful impact on public opinion while others fail? This is the key question in this project.
Our project, “How to Win With Words?”, sets out to outline and systematically test a theory of what we term the strength of political communication, that is, the strength of the impact of political communications on the attention and opinions of the public regarding the debated issue. The project is funded with 5.8 million DKK by the Velux Foundation for a four-year period from 2014 to 2017.
Where previous research on communication strength has focused on features of the communication in itself (e.g., coherence and repetition), we propose that a systematic understanding requires a reorientation towards the fit between the content of the communication and human psychological biases. In particular, research within the cognitive and behavioural sciences suggests that human psychology is biased to seek out, encode and respond to those particular cues that over human evolutionary history disclosed the potential for fitness benefits or fitness loss. On this basis, the general working hypothesis for the project is that political communication becomes strong when it contains cues that had survival value over human evolutionary history. By utilising more focused theories within the cognitive sciences such as prospect theory, social exchange theory and life-history strategy theory, this general hypothesis is fleshed out into concrete predictions about the strength of specific types of communication on specific types of political issues.
The project introduces a unique methodological framework. Following state-of-the-art political communication research, we use experiments to document communication effects to ensure causal inference, but go beyond the extant research in two ways. Most experimental studies of political communication focus on single countries. Yet as we investigate evolved cognitive biases in human psychology, we argue that communications that fit these biases are strong across countries. To test the predicted generality, we therefore embed experiments in cross-national comparative surveys. Furthermore, most studies of political communication rely exclusively on surveys in which participants provide self-reported answers. Yet as we propose that many relevant cognitive biases operate automatically, we cannot exclusively verify their operations using self-reporting. We therefore combine cross-national surveys with cross-national laboratory experiments using psycho-physiology and neuroscience techniques to provide direct evidence that automatic biases are involved in making communication strong. In doing so we will investigate the effect of both video communications, visual stimuli and text communications.
The core research group is located at the Politics and Evolution (PoNE) Lab at the Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, which provides one of the strongest research environments in Europe on political psychology. The core research group is directed by Professor Michael Bang Petersen and Associate Professor Lene Aarøe. The core group works in collaboration with leading international researchers including Associate Professor Kevin Arceneaux (Temple University) and Professor John Hibbing (University of Nebraska-Lincoln).