Political sense
For viewers, dirty politics don’t always win
In the wake of a contentious election season, researcher Paul Bolls has come to a conclusion that may surprise you: When it comes to political advertising, the most effective ads often sling the least mud.
Bolls, an assistant professor of journalism and researcher in the J-School’s PRIME Lab, and undergraduate researcher Katie Roehrick have found that slow-paced non-attack ads most effectively gain people’s attention and help them remember messages.
In Bolls’ research, non-attack ads are defined as those that focus on the strengths and positions of a candidate, as opposed to attack ads, which focus on the weaknesses of an opponent. Pacing refers to the speed of editing, or how many different shots producers fit into an ad.
Bolls uses psychophysiological methods to study how people cognitively and emotionally process media messages. In this particular study, those messages were political ads. To avoid pre-existing attitudes, Bolls chose ads from state and local races around the country, not in Columbia or Missouri.
Researcher Paul Bolls (above left) studies people's cognitive and emotional reactions as they view media messages, including political ads.
Paying attention
First, Bolls measured heart rate as study participants viewed the political ads. The heart rate is a key measurement of attention. Contrary to the intuitive conclusion, the lower the heart rate, the better the attention.
“Work has shown that as you pay more attention to information in your environment, your heart rate actually slows down,” Bolls says. “The theory is that the nervous system is quieting down your body to take in that message.” Using this measurement, Bolls found that participants in the political study paid the most attention to the slow-paced non-attack ads.
In addition, Bolls and colleagues did an “audio recognition” test, in which they played audio clips from the ads and asked participants if they recognized the clips as coming from one of the ads they had viewed. The same ads that grabbed the most attention also led to the most recognition.
“The audio recognition isn’t that surprising,” Bolls says, “but the fact that slow-paced non-attack ads — in theory the least arousing or least exciting of these political ads — proved to be the most effective was a surprise.
Talking to you
The researchers went looking for the reason for the study’s surprising results. They found something simple: direct address.
“Direct address is a very simple act of showing a person on-screen talking directly to the camera as if they’re talking to you,” Bolls says. This technique tends to grab the attention through a personal appeal, and producers made effective use of it in the slow-paced non-attack ads.
That sort of effectiveness is the key to Bolls’ research. Whether dealing with politics, health care information or other messages, he wants to know how people can best communicate and educate. Because of that, his research on attack and non-attack ads has big picture implications to him. The fact that attack ads were less effective could be considered heartening.
“In my mind, one of the most worrisome negative effects of attack ads in political campaigns is that — credible studies indicate this — they tend to make people more cynical toward the whole political process, not just the candidates involved in a race,” Bolls says. “Clearly, I don’t think that’s a good thing for democracy.”