So I ask one of the head volunteers whether we could get some signs. This volunteer is a University of Pennsylvania student. Now, I have to admit I used to be an academic elitist. I thought that the fact that I was educated at THE University of Chicago meant that I was some kind of genius and could make carte blanche statements about just about anything. Penn is a very similar institution - Penn students think that because they are Penn students, the world should bow to them and that their farts smell like roses. I know better.
"The campaign doesn't want to waste resources with signs. Research shows that signs don't work."
Really? So for a while, I told people that they could go to the campaign website and print out signs as pdf files. People weren't convinced. "More money has been spent this year than any other, and you can't print signs? This is ridiculous." "I donated $100 to your campaign and I can't even have a sign? Go to hell." "I will stop by every day until you get them in." I didn't know that people were so connected with their political signs, but it was getting so bad that I went to kinkos and printed 100 xeroxed pages so these people would have something to put up in their damn windows. I ran out within an hour.
Later, I looked into how this research was conducted. Apparently, pollsters go around asking people questions like, "What factors were important to you in your decision to vote for X candidate." People then rank ordered the importance of the various factors. Somewhat unsurprisingly, people ranked things like the Iraq war and the economy very high. They ranked window signs near the bottom. Why not? People don't think they would be influenced by something as ridiculous as a little sign on one's lawn! Based on this evidence, the researchers concluded that candidate window signs were not effective in persuading people to vote for a particular candidate, and so people in the campaign have not provided signs.
This is also why, in my research methods courses, I am somewhat critical of a lot of survey research. Simply put, people don't understand themselves. Now this may seem elitist and pompous for me to say, and I don't mean it to be this way. I too, don't understand myself, at least in how I think and make decisions. When you ask me what 2 + 2 equals, I have no idea how I come up with the correct answer of 4. What influenced me to say 4 and not 5? I don't know. I can't see my thought processes, and I can hardly fathom them. I know something is going on up there, but I have no idea how it works. Much of psychology since behaviorism has been about illuminating those processes that work up there, and we're not all that much closer now than we were when we started.
So I don't know how I know that 2 + 2 = 4. Then how on earth will I know what factors, of the thousands of factors, that influence me to vote for a particular candidate? How am I supposed to remember all the many times I thought of economic issues, or thee Iraq war, or window signs I passed. Humans have limited processing capacity - although we spend our lives convincing ourselves otherwise. We take mental shortcuts, or heuristics, or we trust our gut over trusting our minds.
This all reminds me of two clever experiments. The first is a classic, performed by Solomon Asch (who spent part of his career at Penn, incidentally). Asch ran an experiment in which he had a naive participant come into a room. Then two confederates (actors) walk in who pretend to be other participants. Asch then shows the three lines that vary in length, and asks the participants to determine which is the longest.The two actors say that the medium sized line is in fact the largest, and far more often than not, the naive participant ends up agreeing with them, even though the line is clearly shorter.
The second is a more recent study by Robert Cialdini, of Arizona State University. He has one person standing below a high rise, staring up at the building. No one stops and looks up. But get a group of 2 or 3 people to be staring up at the top of the high rise, and suddenly you find scores of passersby stopping and looking up, wondering what the heck the original few were staring at.
What's my point here? Well, people are influenced by things they don't even recognize they are being influenced by. So when you ask the guy in the Asch experiement, he doesn't necessarily understand that the opinions of the others are tacitly influencing his perception of the length of the line. And second, that it is possible that a few window signs on each block might convince several other people on the block to look up and put a window sign up, or even vote for the candidate in question.
There is a lot of poorly designed research out there. There has to be - if not, there would be very little demand for researchers to improve upon what we know. But the first step in evaluating the world is to begin by noticing patterns. If every person who stops by a campaign office is asking for window signs, but you have some research report by some pollster showing that window signs are not very effective, then maybe you need to reevaluate whether the research report is in fact valid. Scientists are in the business of possibly being wrong. For no other reason than the fact that any result may be due to chance, or that some finding occurs because you don't have the tools necessary to evaluate your hypothesis.
But what disappointed me the most was the Penn student's response. "People are so stupid. Perhaps if they wern't such cows they would realize that their stupid window signs don't make an ounce of difference. It is so infuriating."
Tell that to the woman to contributed $100 and only wants, in return, a sign that costs less than a cent to manufacture. The worst thing a scientist can do is attribute a phenomenon to the stupidity of the participants. None of us should be presumptuous to have the intellect of a messiah, and we should always be both respectful, as well as skeptical, of any scientific finding. Just ask this guy:
