BITTER POLITICS In modern politics, it is common for the public rivalry between politicians to be more intense and performative than their actual personal relationships. While genuine animosity certainly exists, the appearance of deep bitterness is also often a calculated strategy used for political gain.
The strategic use of feigned bitterness Appealing to the base: In a politically polarized environment, taking a hardline stance and demonizing the opposition can energize a politician's supporters. The perception of a deep conflict helps create an "us vs. them" mentality, which can boost voter turnout and donations. Media and public interest: News media and the public are often more drawn to conflict and drama than to bipartisan cooperation. Politicians and news outlets alike can use staged confrontations to generate attention, which can then be used to promote their own agendas. Obscuring real issues: Focusing on personal attacks and bitter public feuds can distract from a lack of progress on substantive issues. By keeping the debate centered on animosity, politicians can avoid having to find complex solutions or alienate parts of their base with uncomfortable policy compromises. Negotiating power: A public image of unwavering opposition can strengthen a politician's hand during private negotiations. By portraying a tough-on-the-opponent facade, they can appeal to their base while still being able to work with their rivals behind the scenes to get things done. Evidence of private camaraderie Despite the harsh public rhetoric, numerous examples reveal that some politicians maintain cordial, and sometimes even friendly, personal and working relationships across party lines. Shared social circles: Politicians from opposing parties often move in the same professional and social spheres, attending many of the same events, committee meetings, and formal dinners. This creates opportunities for personal relationships to develop outside of the public eye. Institutional traditions: In some political systems, like the UK Parliament, parliamentary tradition requires government and opposition members to interact physically in a non-confrontational way. This highlights that day-to-day work often continues amicably despite the public theater. Post-political friendships: Notable examples exist of political rivals who developed close friendships later in life. Former U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, and later Clinton and George W. Bush, are often cited as examples of this phenomenon. Working "across the aisle": Successful bipartisan efforts on policy issues require collaboration, indicating that behind-the-scenes relationships are often more functional than public squabbles suggest. While it may be common for politicians to feign bitterness for strategic purposes, this doesn't mean that all animosity is fabricated. There are certainly cases of deep-seated and genuine political and personal rivalries. The challenge for the public is to discern when a rivalry is authentic and when it is being performed for political gain. A recent study shows that politicians tend to be dishonest even when their preferences are aligned with those of their constituencies (Woon & Kanthak 2016). Lying is commonplace enough for researchers to develop taxonomies of political lies; Pfiffner (1999) delineates three types of lying by presidents: justifiable lies, lies to prevent embarrassment, and lies of policy deception, each having different consequences and effects on public trust. This propensity to compromise honesty is furthermore exacerbated by the structure and size of rewards from holding public office (Caselli & Morelli, 2004); the more lucrative the payoff looks for a decision-maker, the more likely she or he to lie to get that payoff (Gneezy, 2005; Gneezy et al., 2013). Some consider ambiguity to be a method of deception, such as when politicians have a policy preference but, for political gain, either attempt to obfuscate it or pretend they do not have a stance. Ambiguity serves well if a candidate is uncertain about the position of the median voter; being purposefully ambiguous about one’s policy positions allows a candidate more time to investigate voters’ preferences (Glazer, 1990). Such ambiguity can be harmful to voters; for one, it leaves voters uncertain about which candidate is more extreme (Schnakenberg, 2016). When multiple politicians send competing messages to the same voters, they leave voters to wonder which messages are truthful and which are not (Minozzi, 2011). Surprisingly, ambiguity in political rhetoric does not always repel voters and even may, on the contrary, attract them. The preference for an ambiguous candidate is a function of an individuals’ risk orientation and preferences for candidates from one’s own party (Tomz & Houweling, 2009). While politicians are hesitant to tell complete (“black”) lies, they are strongly inclined to deliver partially true claims, or “grey lies” (Bucciol & Zarri, 2013), such as exaggeration. Candidates may exaggerate their messages because their communication with voters exists in a noisy environment with many other actors and messages (Minozzi & Woon, 2016). In sum, politicians lie to voters in a variety of ways for a variety of reasons. Can voters figure out when they are lying? A Primer in Psychology Research on Deception Detection The ability to accurately assess the credibility of messages provided by another person has been well-studied in psychology (Bond & DePaulo, 2006; DePaulo et al., 2003; Vrij, 2008), so it is important to draw upon that literature when investigating voters’ abilities to assess the credibility of politicians. The literature provides a basis for predicting the types of behaviors voters will attend to, and the behaviors by politicians that will help them lie more (or less) successfully. Past research has examined messages in text form, audio form, and video form, and includes statements provided during one-on-one interactions, as well as statements recorded to be shown to observers at a later time (e.g., Bond & DePaulo, 2006). While some research focuses on the use of tools designed to facilitate deception detection (e.g., the polygraph; Statement Validity Analysis), the focus of this review is intuitive lie detection. In other words, we look at the ability of one person to assess the veracity of a message provided by another person, without any additional tools. Across this vast literature, there are two findings about these unaided assessments of truth that are arguably the most consistent. First, people have a truth bias. In other words, they are more likely to judge statements as true than false. Relatedly, they tend to have higher accuracy rates when assessing true statements than false statements (Bond & DePaulo, 2006). There are many potential reasons for this bias that have been proposed (Vrij, 2008). One, for example, is that it is not socially acceptable to go through life suspicious of what one is told and questioning the honesty of those around you. As such, people tend to accept what they are told at face value. In some cases, there may be a lack of motivation to learn the truth (e.g., catching a cheating spouse), sometimes referred to as the ostrich effect, again leading to accepting a message without question. However, an exception to this rule is that law enforcement may demonstrate a lie bias when evaluating suspect statements (Meissner & Kassin 2002), possibly because they expect a high base rate of deception. The second consistent finding is that humans are not particularly skilled at detecting deception. In their meta-analysis, Bond and DePaulo (2006) report a 54% accuracy rate across studies; while this is technically greater than chance at a statistically significant level, it is certainly not an impressive success rate. Further emphasizing that credibility assessment is not a task at which humans naturally excel, “experts” who must assess credibility regularly in their profession (e.g., law enforcement, judges) perform as the same low levels as novices (Bond & DePaulo, 2006). There are two commonly suggested explanations for why this may be the case. These have been referred to as the “wrong subjective cues hypothesis” and the “weak objective cues hypothesis” (Hartwig & Bond 2011). The wrong subjective cues hypothesis suggests that people rely on the wrong cues when attempting to identify deception. Indeed, there is much evidence to suggest this is the case. In 51/58 countries the most frequently reported cue to deception was gaze aversion (Global Deception Research Team, 2006) and generally speaking, many of the behaviors that deceptive individuals are expected to display are based in the assumption that liars are experiencing anxiety and shame (Bond & DePaulo, 2006). However, these types of cues (e.g., fidgeting, blushing, gaze aversion) are, in fact, not associated with deception (DePaulo et al., 2003). Rather, some cues that were most strongly associated with veracity were impression of verbal/vocal immediacy (liars seem less immediate), ambivalence (liars seem more ambivalent), number of details provided (liars provide fewer details), and verbal/vocal uncertainty (liars seems less certain). The fact that the cues people expect to be associated with deceit are not diagnostic may account for poor deception detection accuracy. However, the research on cues to deception also indicates that not only are the stereotypical cues to deceit not useful, but that there are few useful cues, and these “useful” cues are of very limited value. This is the basis for the weak objective cues hypothesis. Only 12 of the 158 cues examined in the DePaulo et al (2003) metanalysis met the effect size threshold of d > 0.2, and only four of those (verbal/vocal immediacy, ambivalence, number of details provided, and verbal/vocal uncertainty) met the threshold of d ≥ 0.3.2 These findings suggest that even if people relied on the most useful cues, differences between liars and truthtellers would still be difficult to detect because those cues are quite weak. A lens model meta-analysis tested which of the two aforementioned hypotheses better account for the data (Hartwig & Bond 2011) and the findings indicate that the weak objective cues hypotheses best accounts for poor deception detection accuracy. When it comes to deceptive behavior and veracity judgments in politics, there is a dynamic between the sender (politician) and the receiver (voter) which is not typical for ordinary interactions between individuals. If citizens think that politicians lie frequently, they may be reluctant to believe politicians’ words easily. Voters are in a particularly difficult situation when it comes to detecting the deception of politicians, because politicians often have the opportunity to plan their lies, as opposed to making them up on the spot. Research suggests that planned lies, as one might expect, are more difficult to detect than spontaneous lies (Bond & DePaulo, 2006). On the other hand, politicians may be especially motivated to get away with their lies, and a sender’s motivation to be believed is associated with higher deception detection accuracy (Bond & DePaulo, 2006). The public’s low knowledge of and inattentiveness to political issues (Carpini et al., 1996; Converse, 1964; Zaller, 1992) constitutes another peculiarity of political deception. Situational familiarity influences people’s veracity judgments in interpersonal settings (Reinhard et al., 2011; Reinhard et al., 2012; Stiff et al., 1989), So, while a politician has strong incentives to hide cues of deceptiveness, less knowledgeable voters may be increasingly likely to rely on ineffectual cues to judge politicians’ truthfulness. On the other hand, voters who are more knowledgeable about politics may be more confident in their own ability to spot political lies, and thus they would be less reliant on cues. K Rajaram IRS 41025 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Thatha_Patty" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. 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