1. Mark Peffley
PS 475, Politics & Media

2.  What types of influence (effects) by what
types of media on what types of behavior
(attitudes & behaviors)?

3.  Political attitudes toward a variety of different
objects
▪ Political objects: Candidates, Issues, Government,
Political trust, Parties, etc.
▪ Non-Political objects: Social Groups (e.g., women,
Latinos, seniors).
▪ Cognition (e.g., stereotypes) & Affect (e.g., prejudice,
emotions)
 Political behavior
▪ Voting decisions, turnout, civic engagement, etc.

4.  News versus Entertainment (e.g., Biden on “Will & Grace”)
 Free (news) versus Paid (ads)
 News Medium: broadcast, newsprint, radio, Internet,
social media
 Paid Medium: door-to-door, leaflets, direct mail,
electronic mail, phone banks, ads
 Note: Much wider diversity of media & outlets is a huge
challenge for media scholars

5.  Reinforcement of existing attitudes
 Attitude change (persuasion)
 Political learning
 Subtle media effects
 Framing
 Priming
 Agenda setting

6.  Trade-off in internal & external validity (next
slide)
 Survey methods (dominant in Political Science)
 Experiments (dominant in Psychology)
 Triangulation: Methodological pluralism to
enhance external & internal validity of findings
 Both: Survey & Experiments
 Lab Experiments (using adult subjects)
 Field Experiments (may talk about later)
 Survey experiments (a hybrid)
 Internet surveys (experiments via survey)

7.  Trade-off between two types of validity: external
versus internal validity
: Can we state that the
independent variables caused the dependent variable
or are there confounding factors that make such
conclusions tenuous?
: Can we generalize the results
of the current study across people, settings, and
outcomes?
: External validity... tend[s] to preoccupy critics
of experiments. This near obsession... tend[s] to be used to
dismiss experiments....

8. Surveys Lab Experiments Depth Interviews Focus Groups
Strengths External validity: Internal validity: Insights: Insights:
Generalize findings Identifying cause-and- •“Soak & poke” in long Beyond superficial
from representative effect relationships via interviews with a handful responses
sample to random assign. of of respondents to see How people think
population participants to diff. how they think and why How different
“Natural” setting treatments or no (e.g., about Will & Grace). groups think
treatment •Allow subjects to Social influences
Less expensive “reveal” meaning vs. Less expensive:
inferring it from simple quick & dirty
survey responses.
•Less expensive
Weaknesses Internal validity: External validity: External & Internal External & Internal
validity validity
Identifying cause- Unrepresentativeness
&-effect of subjects? Generalizability of
relationships Laboratory setting? “sample,” social
Superficial Unrealistic dynamics, setting.
responses procedures, stimuli?
Response bias
(social desirability)
Expensive

9. Sampling
Questionnaire
Construction
Interviewing
Analysis
Interpretations

10. 1. Is it random? Is the sample some variant of a probability (random)
sample? Does everyone in the population have an equal chance of
being selected?
a) If not, the sample is not representative of the population; it is
biased (e.g., Kinsey Institute, Howard Stern & SLOP polls, Time
Magazine’s “Person of the Century” poll). Bad surveys.
b) The results of a non-random sample cannot be generalized to the
population.
2. Is it large enough? Is the random sample large enough to avoid large
amounts of sampling error? (is it > 600?)
3. Is the polling firm reputable? Most reputable polls rely on some variant
of a random sample. Are there “house” effects from surveys that lean
Republican or Democratic? (see Nate Silver)
4. Sampling errors are just the "tip of the iceberg" in terms of problems
or errors with public opinion polls, and tend to give the reader a false
sense of the accuracy of polling results.

11.  NYT: “The nationwide telephone poll was
conducted Sept. 10 to Sept. 14 with 881
registered voters and has a margin of
sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage
points.”

12. In 1908, William Sealy Gosset
(1876-1937), invented a
statistical test that would
change the sciences.
Lesson: Good beer & good science go
together!

13.  Man of the Century: Adolf Hitler and Eric Cartman (Time)
To usher in the New Millennium and say goodbye to the old, Time magazine sponsored an online poll to name the Person
of the Century. At one point late in the balloting, Jesus Christ led the list, followed by Adolf Hitler and Eric Cartman (a character
on the "South Park" cartoon show who finished 14th in People's Beautiful People Poll).
 Everybody Loves Tom! (Parade)
2005 was an Annus Horribilis for actor Tom Cruise. There was that unfortunate bit of couch-bouncing on the Oprah Winfrey
show and his publicized bashing of Brook Shields for using physician-prescribed drugs to treat her depression.
Parade.com decided to conduct an online poll to see if people thought Tom had only himself to blame for his troubles or
whether it was the media’s fault. A whopping 84% of respondents blamed the media. “We at Parade found this a little bit
fishy—so we did some investigating. We found out more than 14,000 (of the 18,000+ votes) that came in, were cast from only 10
computers! Furthermore, there was one computer responsible for nearly 8,400 votes alone, all blaming the media for Tom's
troubles. We also discovered that at least two other machines were the sources of inordinate numbers of votes….There is even a
chance they wrote a special "bot" program for the sole purpose of skewing the results, rather than casting the votes by hand on a
computer.”
 Girls Just Want to Have Too Much Fun (AMA)
In March of 2006, the American Medical Association reported disturbing rates of binge drinking and unprotected sex
among college women during spring break. The report was based on what the researchers claimed was a survey of “a random
sample” of 644 women. The survey results were breathlessly reported on the Today Show, the CBS Early Show, and hundreds of
reports followed on local television and radio newscasts. The findings also were reported in the Time magazine, and in a chart that
ran in the New York Times.
One problem: The sample was not random. The results were based on only women who volunteered to answer the question as
part of an online survey panel. Only about a quarter of these women had ever gone on a spring break trip. The Times
eventually published a correction explaining the misrepresentation.

15. Sample Size Sampling Error (+/-)
Sampling error
2,400 2.0 calculator
1,536 2.5
1,067 3.0
784 3.5
600 4.0
474 4.5
384 5.0
267 6.0
196 7.0
150 8.0
119 9.0
96 10.0
45 15.0

16.  Declining “coverage” in an age of increased
cell phone use, caller id, and fewer land-lines.
 Move to Internet surveys.
 Causal Inference!
 Move to Internet surveys as online experiments?

17.  Some correlations…
 More people die in cities with more doctors.
▪ What this means: Doctors are dangerous, like zombies!
 Students with more clothes have higher SAT
scores.
▪ Buy more clothes to get into a good school!
 Those with long hair live longer than those with
short hair.
▪ Never cut your hair!

18.  Meese commission on pornography (1985)
 Upward trend in availability of pornographic material is
associated with an increase in crime and violence
generally in North America.
▪ Is there a directionality problem?
▪ Is there a possible third variable problem?
▪ Incidence of violent crime will positively correlate with anything
that increased during the same period of time.
▪ Correlation between the incidence of rape and membership in the
Southern Baptist church was very high (+.96) during the same time
period.
▪ Correlation between Halloween and moral decay.

19.  Survey research as correlational: are two or more factors
naturally associated in the real world?
 Method of choice among traditional political scientists.
 Strength is external validity (generalizing findings of the sample
to the population);
 Weakness is internal validity (detecting cause & effect),
▪ which is especially problematic for cross-sectional, one-shot surveys.
 Experimental research: manipulating some factor to see
its effect on another factor.
 Method of choice among psychologists
 Strength is internal validity, the gold standard for understanding
causation;
 Weakness is external validity,
▪ but too often this is taken as an excuse to reject experiments by “old
school” political scientists.

20.  Do attack (negative) ads discourage turnout?
 Survey research answer: No, recall of attack ads is actually
associated with greater turnout, so voters are mobilized, not
demobilized.
▪ Problem: Recall of attack ads is highly unreliable. And people who
forget seeing an ad are less politically engaged, even though they can
be influenced by such ads. Thus, the association between recall of ads
and turnout is a spurious artifact.

21. Recall Recall of Ads
Political
of Ads Engagement
Turnout
Turnout
Actual: the association is
spurious—due to common
Hypothesized dependence on Political
by survey research Engagement.

22.  Experimental answer: Subjects who
viewed attack ads were 2.5% less likely to
vote than the control group (who viewed
no ads) & 5% less likely to turnout than
those viewing positive ads.
 The ads were a single 30-second political ad
embedded in a 15 minute newscast.

23. Subjects randomly assigned to 4
different versions of the ad varied
by:
• Candidate (Feinstein vs. Wilson)
• Ad Tone (Positive vs. Negative)
Feinstein, Feinstein,
Pos. Neg.
Wilson, Wilson,
Pos. Neg.
Product comparison versus “attacks” filled with lies,
distortions and inflammatory images.

24.  This summer, a group of well-financed conservative activists had an idea for what they hoped would be a
last-minute game changer in the presidential race
 A new anti-Obama DVD is dropping into voters’ mailboxes, claiming that the president is the love child
of an illicit relationship between his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, and Frank Marshall Davis, a
Communist party loyalist.
 They went to the unusual length of arranging a focus group to test anti-Obama films. Conducted by
Frank Luntz, the well-known Republican research analyst, a 30-person focus group looked at three
choices: Dinesh D’Souza’s “2016: Obama’s America,” which theorizes that the president’s political
beliefs were shaped by the radical “anticolonial” views of his Kenyan father; “The Hope and the
Change,” a softer critique of the president that features interviews with disaffected former Obama
supporters; and “Dreams From My Real Father,” which posits the implausible theory that the
president’s real father is Mr. Davis, and that Mr. Davis indoctrinated him with Marxist views early on.

25. James N. Druckman
How does television affect political
behavior?
Half the participants watched a televised version of the
first Kennedy-Nixon debate
The other half listened to an audio version.
I used this debate in part because despite popular
conceptions, there is no extant evidence that television
images had any impact on audience reactions. I find that
television images have significant effects—they:
 affect overall debate evaluations
 prime people to rely more on personality
perceptions in their evaluations
 enhance what people learn
Television images matter in politics, and may have
indeed played an important role in the first Kennedy-
Nixon debate.
Note: only used students who had not heard about the
Kennedy-Nixon debate.

26.  Experiments are social situations that are constructed
to simulate important features of our daily lives. They
involve:
 Random Assignment of Participants (subjects randomly
assigned to diff. conditions)
 Standardization (Control, Manipulating variables)
 Placebo effects (control condition)
 Well-designed experiments also guard against
Experimental bias
 (1) Expectancy effects
 (2) Experimenter bias
 (3) Demand characteristics (use of deception)

27.  Standardization (Control: Manipulating
variables): goal is to vary just one or two factors
(independent variables) at a time to pinpoint
how changes in just one or two things influence
behavior (the dependent variable).
 The experimental conditions are exactly the same in
every respect, except one factor, the independent
variable. Thus, if the dependent variable varies across
the experimental conditions, we know the
manipulation caused the change.

28.  Random assignment: Because we can never include (and
statistically control for) all the factors that might influence
the dependent variable, randomly assigning each subject
to a treatment group eliminates all extraneous factors in
one fell swoop. Because the people in each treatment
group would—in every conceivable way—average about
the same for most characteristics.

29. Same design for clinical trials to determine causal impact of treatments for alcoholism, Hepatitis C, etc.
Why do funding agencies in health insist on experiments to test impact of treatments?

30.  Placebo effects: Control conditions help
determine the extent of placebo effects (simply
being in an experiment) in an experimental
manipulation.
 Not all experiments have control conditions, but the
ones that do allow one to rule out placebo effects.

31.  Expectancy effects, Experimenter bias,
Demand characteristics. Use deception to
ensure that subjects cannot determine
the relevant hypotheses or tests.
 Example: impact of real campaign ads

32.  Replication: “You gotta problem?”—with something
about the experiment (the treatments, setting,
subjects)?
 Experimenters have a solution: replicate the experiment
on every dimension except the one you want to vary. If
the results are different, it is likely due to that one factor.
If they are the same, you have more confidence in the
results.
 Example: make the “attack” ads more negative, or have
people watch more ads over time, or use subjects from
another city, etc.

33.  Threats to external validity: David Sears on college
sophomores.
 For what types of attitudes and behaviors does Sears say
findings from college sophomores may not generalize to people
in general?
▪ They have less crystallized attitudes, easier to change
▪ They are very attentive and willing to be effortful and complete any task
▪ They tend to be more socially liberal than the general population
 Responding to Sears:
 Studies show that as long as there is some variation on the independent variable
among student subjects, experimental effects can still be detected. Only when there
is no variation will we fail to detect the impact of the independent variable on the
dependent variable.
 Even if the content of people’s attitudes & behavior varies across subgroups and
cultures, the process by which they think and act does not vary.
 Bottom line: critics are the ones who need to defend their criticisms of
using college sophomores. Blanket dismissals won’t cut it!

34.  Advantages (internal validity)
 1. Ability to test causal inferences.
 2. Ability to explore the details of process.
 3. Relative economy.
 Disadvantages (external validity)
 1. Sampling bias: Unrepresentative subject pools (i.e., over-use of
college sophomores).
 2. Artificial environment, esp. in terms of “Mundane realism” (any
superficial appearance of reality. The similarity of experimental
events to everyday experiences.)
▪ But need to consider “Experimental realism” (the experiment captures the intended
essence of the situation when subjects are caught up in the experiment and are truly
influenced by it).
 3. In the treatment condition, everyone is exposed to the treatment which
may not be an accurate portrayal of reality (e.g., attention levels, remote
controls).

35.  Survey & experiments (influence of TV violence,
cigarette smoking)
 Survey experiments (hybrid)
▪ Question wording experiments (text only)
▪ Internet surveys (video experiments via survey)

36. In 1991, big correlation between whites’
negative stereotypes of blacks and their
opposition to welfare. Most whites
mistakenly assumed that blacks were the
principal beneficiary of welfare.
Can we conclude that negative racial
stereotypes cause opposition to welfare?
Why or why not?

37.  Now think about a [black woman, white woman]
in her early twenties with a ten year old child
and who has been on welfare for the past year.
 ½ respondents randomly assigned to the black
welfare mother condition
 Other ½ respondents randomly assigned to the
white welfare mother condition
 Question: why not ask everyone about both the
black and the white welfare mothers and then
compare responses?
 The two conditions (questions) are exactly the
same in every respect, except for the race of the
welfare mother.
 Any differences in responses must be due to the
manipulation.

38. Conclusion: The much higher correlation between attitudes toward Black than White welfare mother
and opposition to welfare shows: When Whites think of welfare, they think of Black welfare
mothers, not white welfare mothers.

39. Appendix I. Morphed Images
For each candidate, 3 images were morphed.1 This procedure removes distinctive features and creates a very
“average” face; it also increases attractiveness. Because each candidate shares 2 images, the resulting faces are
extremely similar while appearing to be distinct individuals. This methodology diminishes the likelihood that
support differentials across treatment groups are due to different target candidates.
White Candidate 1:
+ +
A B C
White Candidate 2:
+ +
A B D

40. Light-skinned Black Candidate:
+ +
A E F
Dark-skinned Black Candidate1:
+ +
E F G
The dark-black candidate was purposefully generated from all black
images so that he is different from the light-skinned black candidate in both
complexion and phenotype (his nose and lips are more afrocentric). The
hair and eyebrows of the light-skinned candidate have also been digitally
lightened
1
.