Smear Me Once

Via Ezra Klein, some depressing research from John Bullock:

Much work on political persuasion maintains that people are influenced by information that they believe and not by information that they don’t. By this view, false beliefs have no power if they are known to be false. This helps to explain frequent efforts to change voters’ attitudes by exposing them to relevant facts. But findings from social psychology suggest that this view requires modification: sometimes, false beliefs influence people’s attitudes even after they are understood to be false. In a trio of experiments, I demonstrate that the effect is present in people’s thinking about politics and amplified by party identification. I conclude by elaborating the consequences for theories of belief updating and strategic political communication.

In essence, if you hear that Hillary Clinton had Vince Foster murdered, this lowers your opinion of her. If you later find out that she did not, in fact, do this, your opinion improves. But not back up to its original level. And the effect is especially strong if you're a Republican (and conversely if the target of the smear is a Republican). In essence, the damage done by years of ludicrous anti-Clinton smears cannot be repaired even if everyone comes to know the truth and the same is true of the newer, but possibly more virulent, made up emails about Barack Obama being an America-hating Muslim.

Which gets at one of the less fortunate ambiguities of the past several years of progressive institution-building. One major goal of the institution-building impulse has been to more effectively counter the Republican Noise Machine. The honorable and decent way to do this, of course, is with counterpunching efforts that identity and aggressively push back against dishonest smears. Bullock's research indicates that while this sort of thing can be helpful, it still leaves you at a structural disadvantage. If 100 percent of the population hears your opponent's smears, and then later 100 percent of the population hears your debunking of the smear, you still find up at a disadvantage even if everyone finds the debunking convincing.

To be competitive in the smear wars, it seems, it's actually necessary to fight fire with fire and produce your own lies and distortions. That, however, doesn't make for a very good fundraising pitch especially since the best thing a fundraiser for a progressive cause can offer to a potential donor is typically a sense of enhanced self-righteousness (thus requiring an honorable purpose) rather than anything appealing to direct material interests.

Comments

You mean all the BusHitler blather actually works?

Sk

Posted by Sk | November 28, 2007 10:00 AM

Here's the problem with fighting fire with fire: Progressives need the political process to work and conservatives don't. If everyone goes cynical and decides that politics is all lies, then there's no way to counter the power of the corporations and the rich.

Posted by Pericles | November 28, 2007 10:03 AM

Speak for yourself. Since when has self-righteousness required that we satisfy some vague sense of "honorable"? Ass-kicking works fine for me.

Posted by Dan Miller | November 28, 2007 10:03 AM

I think that this strategy can be effective eventually; the long-term project is to discredit the various sources of these smears (chain e-mails, Matt Drudge, Fox News, pretty much the entire mainstream media), so that future smears are preemptively ignored by their intended audience. Hearing Fox News say that Hillary Clinton murdered Vince Foster doesn't lower my opinion of her at all, because I know that Fox News is powered by evil. If that attitude spreads to a sufficient proportion of the voting public, then their power will be destroyed. And similarly for other sources; we want people to treat a forwarded e-mail saying that Barack Obama is a Manchurian Muslim the same way they would treat an e-mail saying that Prince Barack Obama of Cameroon wants to give them $4,320,795.84. I think that's a viable long-term goal; while it's certainly not guaranteed to succeed, I think things aren't quite as hopeless as this study might lead you to believe.

Posted by OhioBoy | November 28, 2007 10:11 AM

We have another option available, thanks to the extreme.

We can do HONEST smears. The current national-level Republicans *are* fascist brownshirts. Bush *does* like to torture innocent people. Cheney *did* shoot a man in the face, and then forced him to apologize for being shot. The Wall Street Journal editorial page DOES lie constantly about everything. Romney lies constantly about his record as governor, having flipflopped on every single policy anyone can think of; and Romney loves having innocent people tortured and imprisoned, since he wants to "double Guantanamo". Giuliani loves beating up, locking up, and torturing innocent people, and promoted it as policy when he was Mayor of New York. Almost every Republican in or running for national office has the foreign policy understanding of a brain-damaged parrot, being unable to say anything but "war! 9/11! if you're not with us you're against us!"

So there's nothing dishonorable about pointing this sort of stuff out.

Posted by Nathanael Nerode | November 28, 2007 10:11 AM

Interesting data. If you come at this from the angle that evolution has designed our emotional systems to be optimal in some sense, then you can probably reconcile these results by saying that we subconsciously adopt the adage that "where there's smoke there's liable to be fire". In everyday life (as opposed to politics), this quick and dirty rule probably works pretty well.

Anyway, I'm with Dan Miller. Given the history of lies and deception from the other side for the last two decades, it would be dishonorable not to fight fire with fire.

Posted by Jim W | November 28, 2007 10:13 AM

As I posted at Ezra's, wonder if this is a relevant smear, perhaps a test case?

Police confiscate racist, sexist fliers
November 27, 2007 19:18 EST

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) -- Authorities have confiscated a handful of fliers containing racist and sexist slurs about presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama.

Police say the fliers also urge support for Democratic rival John Edwards.

Story County sheriff's officials say two fliers were found yesterday in the town of Slater and one on the Iowa State University campus in Ames.

The crude, hand-lettered fliers seek support for Edwards, who is referred to as -- quote -- "the white man." The fliers use epithets to describe Clinton and Obama.

Officials say there was no evidence that anyone associated with the Edwards campaign was responsible for the fliers. Police are not investigating the incident as a criminal matter because the fliers didn't violate the law.

http://www.kgan.com/template/inews_wire/wires.regional.ia/242ef42b-www.kgan.com.shtml

Posted by El Cid | November 28, 2007 10:15 AM

psst, i heard that rudy's top advisor is a pedophile priest. pass it on.

Posted by Kolohe | November 28, 2007 10:15 AM

my comment 2 above should say "We have another option available thanks to the extremely deranged nature of the current Republicans".

Posted by Nathanael Nerode | November 28, 2007 10:16 AM

A few thoughts:

* nu? this is something we didn't know?

* what Pericles said. Pace Dan Miller (who does raise a good point: we liberals do need to learn to play the game and stop sending the message "we're above all that" which just gets translated as "liberals are effete"), the advantage anti-gummint conservatives have is that, even if when they sling mud, both sides end up dirty, that still makes their case that "politics is a dirty business which is at best a necessary evil and gummint can't and ought not to try to do anything except for kill brown people and if both sides are equally bad, why not vote for the side that wants to make laws prohibiting icky people from doing icky things". OTOH, when we progressives and liberals sling mud it doesn't make our case ... it makes the case of the other side.

* "Via Ezra Klein" yet again? At one time there was the Chesterbelloc. Now we have the Ygleklein. ;)

Posted by DAS | November 28, 2007 10:16 AM

psst, i heard that rudy's top advisor is a pedophile priest. pass it on.

As we all know, Matthew is not immune to smearing his opponents, since he has presented this accusation as a fact several times.

Hillary had Vince Foster murdered. It is an accusation, so therefore it is true. Just like the accusation against the priest is true, according to Matthew.

Posted by Al | November 28, 2007 10:20 AM

The validity of Bullock's finding seems dependent on the inherent believability of the message in question. For example, I doubt my opinion of Hilary Clinton would be much influenced by being told one hundred times that she had Vince Foster murdered, because all the available evidence indicated that she didn't.

Now, I didn't read Bullock's original paper (it's 49 pages in length and not available online) but, once again, the methodology here seems inherently suspect. How exactly did Bullock go about collecting his data? What false messages did he give to his test subjects and then later discredit?

Posted by James Gary | November 28, 2007 10:21 AM

To be competitive in the smear wars, it seems, it's actually necessary to fight fire with fire and produce your own lies and distortions.

I don't know why the accusations need to be lies, or even distortions. And it's crazy to think that our politicians lacked the will to engage in the same; they just weren't very good at it.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | November 28, 2007 10:24 AM

seems, it's actually necessary to fight fire with fire and produce your own lies and distortions.

Fight fire with napalm.

And you don't need to produce your own lies and distortions. You need to make it very clear to a press that's habitually cringing in anticipation of the Republican boot that they'll get an even bigger kicking if they continue to cringe.

That's to say, it's time to force Patrick panty-sniffing Healey to report on Rudolph Giuliani with the same alacrity he has for Hillary Clinton. The GOP top dogs don't need smearing; they need to be the subjects of accurate reporting.

One final point, given that the fucktard Al is here: perhaps, just perhaps this coming election year will allow us to discover the truth behind the assumption that some of the most persistent trolls are paid for the privilege.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | November 28, 2007 10:27 AM

I'm sure this has been stated a million times before, but the basic problem with our side is that, once something bad comes up (like, say, having a pedophile for a close adviser), we just don't have an echo chamber in the media to ratchet the incident up into a full-blown crisis that everyone hears about.

Posted by Jim W | November 28, 2007 10:29 AM

To be competitive in the smear wars, it seems, it's actually necessary to fight fire with fire and produce your own lies and distortions.

Hang on, Matt..you can't reach this conclusion solely on the basis of the data provided (assuming you believe it). Even assuming it be true that debunking the smear still leaves some damage to the target, this study says nothing about whether there's any damage to the perpetrator of the smear and if so, whether that damage is greater than the residual damage to the target.

And, as Pericles says, this study says nothing about the possible second-order damage of trading smears, i.e., the possibility that increased cynicism about the political system (assuming that is the result of trading smears) might not affect both sides of the political spectrum equally.

The study is interesting, but you're jumping to huge conclusions on very thin data.

Posted by Glenn | November 28, 2007 10:30 AM

Hillary had Vince Foster murdered. It is an accusation, so therefore it is true. Just like the accusation against the priest is true, according to Matthew.

From Wikipedia: "[Alan Placa] is employed [at Giuliani Partners], despite having been suspended by the Catholic church after a grand jury accused him both of sexually molesting numerous children and of covering up molestation by other priests."

Cf. the evidence that Hillary had Vince Foster murdered: none.

Posted by James Gary | November 28, 2007 10:30 AM

I'm mostly with SomeCallMeTim on this. We don't need outright lies or distortions, what we need is to take radical simplifications of the Repub positions and drum them up more. They do this to us all the time, and it's very effective.

I remember a good example from our side awhile back. Right after Bush was re-elected in 2004 and he looked nigh unstoppable, he decided to quickly use his "mandate" to press forward with his social security privatization plan.

And I remember one commentator (I don't remember who) saying something along the lines of, "The Democrats need to say that Bush is trying to END social security and say it often." And that's exactly right. To really strike a note with the broader population we need quick, blunt statements that hit our opponents where they are weak.

Posted by Just Another Greg | November 28, 2007 10:38 AM

From The Republican Nemesis:

The most important reason why negative campaigning has worked so well for the Republicans is because their negative attacks on the Democrats create a positive impression of Republican candidates, who appear—in contrast—to be individuals who do not possess the defects that they have accused others of having. They define themselves [positively] by defining their Democratic opponents [negatively]. On a visceral level, what the Republicans actually "stand for" in the minds of Swing Voters on election day is that they are not Democrats—those defective people who seem to have been born to ruin everything. It's simple, really. By bashing Democrats, Republicans present themselves as the desirable alternative. Negative character attacks also provide the Republicans with one more benefit. They know that the media will give priority coverage to their personal attacks, distracting attention away from any of the "substance" blather that Democrats always like to talk about.

Posted by James Kroeger | November 28, 2007 10:39 AM

What Glenn said. Gross oversimplification attempting to be insight.

Of course, even gross oversimplifications can have a core of truth, or at least truthiness. After all, millions now believe without a shred of evidence that we got into an illegal war in Iraq because of Bush lies.

Hint to fans of the "Plamegate" and "Downing St. Memo" conspiracy scams--rumor, gossip, innuendo, and psychic mind-reading of high officials via the internet don't meet the "evidence" threshold.

Posted by Robert Powell | November 28, 2007 10:52 AM

Through the 90s and the republican smear machine I had an okay attitude towards Hillary. I was not a big fan but, did not dislike her either. I mostly ignored the right anyhow.
After the Monica thing, i did feel anger to Bill because he basically played right to the rightwing smears by doing exactly what they accused him of doing. it was so stupid and sloppy of him. And he embarrassed our party and his family.
But, during this decade hillary seemed to be more in line with the right, had fundraisers for her by murdoch, ect. It just seemed so callous and calculating. She did not seem to be a real democrat.
i find she is not a trustworthy person and is someone I don't feel is right for this job with the last 7 years of Bush and his abuses.
So, my dislike of Hillary was caused by herself and not by the right.
I think those who are low information people are the most easily influenced but, those who bother to find out information on their own and form their own opinions are not swayed by the smears.

Posted by vwcat | November 28, 2007 11:03 AM

Why are you commenting on this topic when the whole country needs to hear about the growing Republican capriphilia scandal? Those rightwingnuts just can't leave the goats alone!

Posted by rea | November 28, 2007 11:09 AM

I, too, vote for 'honest smears.' Until that purely hypothetical day that the GOP shapes up, we should have plenty of quite factual ammunition to use against them.

Posted by low-tech cyclist | November 28, 2007 11:10 AM

Is there a rhetorical term for no longer believing your own argument because it has been adopted by someone you find repellent? "Ad hominem" is probably technically correct, although it doesn't quite capture it.

Posted by Glenn | November 28, 2007 11:16 AM

This finding is not particularly surprising. After all we don't tend to remember the evidence that led us to most of our beliefs. We are more likely to simply have the belief or remember that we had evidence that was convincing once. So if we get information that leads us to have a certain opinion of someone, it is likely that what remains is that opinion of someone, and not that opinion of someone conditioned on the evidence that led to the opinion.

So the removal of the evidence is not likely to do much to remove the opinion, except in extreme cases in which the the link between the evidence and the belief stands out sharply in ones mind.

Which is mostly just to say that while of course the evidence in the study is important, but the result is the one that should have been expected going in. (Of course that itself might be a danger for how the conclusion was reached).

The days when we believed that beliefs were held primarily for rational reasons should have ended with Hume.

Posted by Lon | November 28, 2007 11:27 AM

What Lon says is correct. What needs to be kept in mind, though, is that forming and maintaining useful beliefs out of the huge amount of messy data we are presented with, given limited computational resources, is a difficult computational problem.

Our tendencies to adopt stereotypes, to "judge a book by its cover", to adopt negative feelings toward people on the basis of unfounded rumours, etc, may be irrational from a strictly logical viewpoint. However, they may be more rational than alternative computational algorithms that are subject to the same constraints.

Posted by Jim W | November 28, 2007 11:55 AM

I'm with the "What's the problem with dirty?" crowd.

2008 is going to be a knife fight. The Repubs have used smear after smear for campaign after campaign. I don't care whether knives the Democratic candidate uses are based on a lie or the truth. I just want to be sure they'll USE the damn things.

Often and with vicious glee.

Posted by Clark | November 28, 2007 12:23 PM

I don't think the Dems need to go in for lies and distortions; there's plenty of embarrassing material on the GOP that's true. What they do need to do is attack much, much more often. They still seem to underestimate the effectiveness of the the Noise Machine, and to be taken off guard by the attacks and smears. This is dangerously naive and has to stop.

Posted by beckya57 | November 28, 2007 12:35 PM

The days when we believed that beliefs were held primarily for rational reasons should have ended with Hume.

Sadly, believing otherwise would require us to believe something for rational reasons. Thus, we continue to believe in the rationality of our beliefs. It's a vicious, vicious circle.

Count me in with the "honest smears" contingent. They're more effective in the long run, because there seems to be a law of diminishing smear returns in American politics. If you repeat the same lies over and over, it eventually starts to dawn on the audience that you're a bunch of liars. Then the public starts to reject the smears out of hand before they have any effect.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | November 28, 2007 12:54 PM

false beliefs influence people’s attitudes even after they are understood to be false

This is undoubtedly true. The Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry didn't work because people believed Kerry was a liar or a coward. They worked because people wanted to believe it. It was a taunt.

That's why the term "swift boating" is now universally understood to refer to a smear campaign. The Democrats use it this way, the Republicans use it this way, even the press uses it this way, despite the fact that they treated the Swift Boat accusations as credible at the time.

Posted by Jinchi | November 28, 2007 12:58 PM

"And the effect is especially strong if you're a Republican..."

THis suggest that the effect doesn't work the same for all people. I think that republicans tend to be people who do not question thier beliefs. I think there is also a bigger contingent of what I would call the less informed among republicans. But the thing is, democrats don't need the 30% of the electorate that is always republican. They need swing voters. I would like to know what the study says about these segments, and how you might dummy them up.

Posted by cw | November 28, 2007 1:07 PM

Another vote lies and distortions, or if you're squeamish, hyperbole, rhetoric, and polemic. Too many Democrats act as if we are in a dialectical dialogue, fact-finding commission, or judicial inquiry. No, we are doing politics.

"Daddy Warbucks" & "Elmer Gantry" are representative of the more determined progressive times. Or "The Cross of Gold" speech, or many of the political speeches of FDR and Truman. Read them.

Political speech has only an instrumental meaning.

Posted by bob mcmanus | November 28, 2007 1:13 PM

There is a second approach -- instead of fighting smears with smears, we could create a culture which destroys the lives and livelihoods of those caught trafficking in smears. That is, we could reform our libel laws to make it possible for even public figures to sue for repeated, egregious, baseless statements.

Posted by Punditus Maximus | November 28, 2007 1:17 PM

If I remember correctly they tried to pass a law against lying in a political comapign in Washington or Oregon and it was struck down by some court.

Posted by cw | November 28, 2007 1:26 PM

I am glad MY brings this up, it's a good point. Leftists really need to stop dishonestly smearing conservatives as racists because they like "tax cuts".

Posted by pjgoober | November 28, 2007 2:01 PM

No no, conservatives aren't racists because they want neverending tax cuts. They're selfish assholes because they want neverending tax cuts.

They're racists cause they're scared of all those dirty brown people and want laws putting up a minefield between here and Mexico.

Glad I could clear that up.

Posted by Clark | November 28, 2007 2:52 PM

But she did! (Murder Vince Foster, I mean.)

Posted by its true | November 28, 2007 3:32 PM

Letting people keep more of their income is not selfish.

Posted by correction | November 28, 2007 3:40 PM

Tax cuts, illegal immigration, and the war in Iraq are issues that deserve serious debate. Turning everything into a cartoon, Daddy Warbucks vs Lenin's Ghost, is not helpful.

Democrats and Republicans alike have a tendency to confuse political opponents with actual enemies. We have real enemies. Pretending that they're regular Americans who happen to belong to the "other" party is to confuse governance and electoral politics with a high school football rivalry.

Posted by Robert Powell | November 28, 2007 4:27 PM

So, Bush and the neocons, who have sent thousands of Americans off to their death, are not our actual enemies? You're right. I guess we should be grateful that they have only killed thousands of us.

Posted by Jim W | November 28, 2007 4:34 PM

Monkeys fight by throwing shit at each other.

Shit sticks.

Big surprise.

This is why I don't think like you people - I work on evidence. Solely. My opinion of someone is based one what I know about them now - not what I heard ten years ago which later proved to be false. And quite frankly, pretty rarely does anything I heard ten years ago end up proven to be false - because I don't listen to no-evidence bullshit in the first place - which is your real problem.

A "smear" is a smear in the first place because it's a charge with no real evidence behind it. People believe it because they want to - not because the smear has any evidence or anybody credible supporting it. So when the smear is debunked, of course it doesn't affect them - because they wanted to believe it in the first place.

In fact, this is true of humans in general, who have a built-in genetically wired need to believe that they're better than everybody else. Simple primate hierarchy. Therefore, ANY reduction of someone else's status is going to be believable - even if, paradoxically, it comes from some third party rather than the person being influenced.

Humans talk behind each other's back as a psychological need to reinforce their status in their own minds and the minds of others.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | November 28, 2007 6:39 PM

"Much work on political persuasion maintains that people are influenced by information that they believe and not by information that they don’t."

A pretty accurate description of the typical commenter here!

Posted by Steve Sailer | November 28, 2007 7:26 PM

"Much work on political persuasion maintains that people are influenced by information that they believe and not by information that they don’t." A pretty accurate description of the typical commenter here!

Sailer, are you actually talking about yourself?

Posted by MGJ | November 28, 2007 9:25 PM

Well, the subject of this thread gives me a hook to throw out a pretty amusing example of wartime "smearing" I came across a few months ago.

I've been spending a lot of time looking through really old magazines, and it turns out that one thrust of Allied propaganda during WWI was that Germany's inherent wickedness derived from the fact that it was ruled by the Prussians, "an Asiatic, Semitic race," in contrast to the "noble Aryans" of Britain and France...

Old magazines really contain a lot of amusing and interesting facts...

Posted by RKU | November 28, 2007 10:22 PM

I doubt either the accuracy of this study or that the right conclusion is being drawn from it. Every lawyer, for example, knows that if you begin a trial with an opening statement that has a dynamite accusation against the defendant that you then never prove, or you try to prove and your proof is debunked, your credibility for the entire case is lost. But maybe my example shows that the best way to deal with smears is not to come up with smears of your own, but rather to associate the smearer with a larger movement that cannot be viewed as credible, so that each liar risks bringing disrepute on his or her entire cause.

Posted by RaymondA | November 28, 2007 10:52 PM

One thing that is not clear from the study, although it seems assumed by some of the comments, is that the phenomenon being described is restricted to negative false information.

It seems just as plausible that if one can create a false positive opinion of someone, that that positive opinion would survive the removal of the evidence for it. Or maybe we are too quick to tear people down and too slow to rehabilitate our impression of them.

RaymondA: the courtroom example is rather different than the claim being given here in that in a court one promises future evidence and so jurors should be actively looking for it. In the kind of cases being considered, false claims are used to create an impression, but there is no reason to think that people are constantly doing an evidence based reevaluation of their impressions of people. I doubt this phenomena would work if people realized that their negative impression of someone was based on the debunked claim. But we seldom keep our impressions of people so closely connected to the claims that created that impression.

Posted by Lon | November 29, 2007 11:02 AM

It's not hard to see why liberals are always out-gunned in raw contests for power, even though liberalism as a belief system is far more productive to intelligent governance. The basic difference today between liberals and conservatives is that latter believe the ends justify the means and the former are more committed to processes, such as democracy, rule of law, checks and balances etc… Concern for rules of the game once distinguished American conservatives who were repelled by "knee-jerk liberalism," but no longer. Now, the groups that make up the conservative coalition all have a very clear ideology with very specific aims. The Religious Right believes in the Bible. Wall Street believes in laissez faire. The neoconservatives believe that might makes right. Conservatives want to bomb Iran, outlaw abortion, cut taxes – often with the attitude consequences be damned. This makes their communication objectives comparatively easy since all that is required is to invent slogans or smears to get from point A to point B, regardless of the truth.

The strongest commitment for liberals, on the other hand, is rule of law, freedom of speech, checks and balances, divided powers, civil liberties, a regulated economy, separation of church and state – process issues all. Liberals are almost constitutionally required to explain things. It's in their DNA. It's who they are. Liberalism as an idea requires it. So liberals would find themselves at war with their very natures should they try to copy conservatives and use deceit and deception to achieve a particular agenda. If they tried they would no longer be liberals, but Leftists.

This also helps to explain why conservatives find it so much easier to act ruthlessly in politics. Since they are interested almost exclusively with ends their only goal politically is to remove all obstacles to their final destination. Liberals, concerned more with process and means and a defense of the liberal democratic tradition itself, are powerless to retaliate. The very demands of their political ideology compel liberals to make room for the views of the other side, to invite deliberation and compromise. This is what makes it very easy for conservatives to use the liberal's values against them. What does Ann Coulter do when liberals attack her for her toxic views? She accuses them of trying to take away her freedom of speech. What do religious conservatives do when liberals object to the mixing of church and state? They protest that liberals are persecuting them for their faith It's easy to understand the double standards, hypocrisy and irrationalities that we see on the Right all the time once you understand the basic mindset and dynamic involved. But it is difficult to get others to comprehend it, which only means that the unsuspecting public is likely to remain vulnerable to Right Wing manipulations for some time to come.

Posted by Ted Frier | November 30, 2007 9:51 AM