How they get away with that: politicians bob and weave from debate questions

I touched on this in this morning’s email, but the NPR story on how politicians “pivot” from the question that was asked to the question they wish they had been asked. This is worth reading and/or listening to.

If you have watched a debate, you have watched a pivot. “The pivot is a way of taking a question that might be on a specific subject, and moving to answer it on your own terms,” O’Donnell says.

Take, as just one small example, a moment from the 2004 debate between President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry.

You could, by the way, just as easily use an example from Kerry — both Bush and Kerry used pivots roughly the same amount of the time.

In this case, the moderator, Bob Schieffer of CBS News, asked President Bush about job loss. What, Schieffer wondered, would Bush say to someone who has lost his job? Bush began by promising to “continue to grow our economy,” and then, subtly, changed course. Suddenly, Bush was talking about education, specifically his signature No Child Left Behind legislation. “I went to Washington to solve problems,” he explained. “And I saw a problem in the public education system.”

In two or three sentences, Bush had moved from a question about lack of jobs to an answer about education and a promise fulfilled. That is the power of the pivot. Which is why, in the age of debate coaches like O’Donnell, candidates in both parties use them all the time — “frequently,” O’Donnell says, “better than 60 or 70 percent of the time, I would say.”

Todd Rogers, a behavioral psychologist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, got interested in looking at pivots, or dodges, or whatever you want to call them, after watching the 2004 Bush/Kerry debate I quoted earlier.

What he found was that when a politician answered the health care question with a health care answer, viewers could recall the question he was asked and thought the candidate was likable, honest and trustworthy. 

This led Rogers to the conclusion that people are capable of detecting dodges — but only if they’re egregious. They don’t seem capable of detecting subtle evasions.

Rogers believes this is because we have limited attention, and most of the time when we’re watching debates, we spend that attention on social evaluation — do we like this person? Do we trust this person? — and only generally monitor content.

It’s only when the speaker is wildly inconsistent that some deep mental wire is tripped. “It raises some flags, and we direct our limited attention to assessing whether this person is doing something unusual by failing to answer the question and offering an egregiously different answer,” Rogers says.

This, Rogers believes, is why politicians can get away with dodging questions as much as 70 percent of the time.

“Politicians,” he says, “are exploiting our cognitive limitation without punishment.”