Monday, January 28, 2008

Why We Get Oversimplification During the Campaigns

Source: "The Science of Presidential Complexity" by Shankar Vedantam, The Washington Post, Monday, January 28, 2008.

Excerpts:
In an unusual study analyzing State of the Union addresses like the one President Bush will give tonight, psychologists found a curious pattern in the speeches delivered by 41 U.S. presidents. The pattern explains a lot about why politicians such as Romney and Edwards talk to voters the way they do.

The study found that in the first three years after a new president takes office, his speeches displayed higher levels of complexity compared with addresses in the fourth year in office. In the first three speeches, presidents were more likely to acknowledge other points of view, potential pitfalls and unintended consequences. In the fourth year, however -- as they were about to run for reelection -- the complexity of their speeches plunged.

Not only that, but American presidents who showed a sharper decline in complexity were more likely to be reelected than those who continued to acknowledge that the challenges facing the nation were complex.......

(I)t appears to be the case that the skills required to win power and the skills required to govern are different. In a preliminary analysis of Democratic presidential primary debates in 2004, for example, Conway found that candidates who offered complex arguments were rated less popular in subsequent public opinion polls than those who offered simplistic arguments. Conway emphasized that his study of the debates hadn't yet passed rigorous scientific muster -- but the finding dovetails nicely with work by psychologist Peter Suedfeld at the University of British Columbia, who once found the same pattern among revolutionaries.

Those who changed history -- a group that included leaders from George Washington to Fidel Castro -- invariably had simple ideas as they went about winning power but quickly increased the complexity of their thinking after they obtained power. Revolutionaries who offered complex ideas to begin with or those whose complexity did not quickly increase after wining power usually were failures.

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