Truth - Al Franken [11]
We know about the meetings with the GOP pollsters because the Associated Press filed a Freedom of Information Act request for Ridge’s daily appointment calendars, a request that Ridge’s staff conveniently failed to comply with until three days after he left office. What we don’t know is whether Luntz specifically focus-group-tested the phrase “We don’t do politics in the Department of Homeland Security.”
The terror alerts served no purpose other than to remind people that they could be incinerated at any moment. But that reminder was exactly the point. It’s an old saw in politics that you don’t change pants in mid-shit. So the Bush administration was determined to keep every American shitting his or her pants as frequently as possible in the months leading up to the election.
The “mid-shit” maxim is actually backed up by decades of peer-reviewed social science research, specifically in a little-known but actually real subfield of social psychology known as “Terror Management Theory,” or TMT. Google it. It’s fascinating. But in case you don’t have a computer, let me save you some trouble.
TMT argues that much of human behavior and human culture can be understood as a response to the fear of death. Duh. Among other things, TMT predicts that death-related thoughts drive people to affirm their preexisting cultural worldview (boo gay marriage!) and to support “charismatic/visionary” leaders (Bush) over “task-oriented” leaders (Kerry) or “relationship-oriented” leaders who emphasize the need for people to work together and accept mutual responsibility (Kerry). The predictions of TMT have been borne out by more than 175 published experiments. As compared to, say, the number of peer-reviewed studies concluding that human beings have nothing to do with global warming, which is zero.
Of all the TMT studies I’ve read (two), my favorite is “The Effects of Mortality Salience and Reminders of 9/11 on Support for President George W. Bush,” which appeared in the September 2004 issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. In a series of experiments conducted on student volunteers from across the political spectrum, the authors found that reminders of death generally or 9/11 specifically caused subjects to view Bush more favorably.
The first experiment divided the students into two groups to test whether thinking about death affected their politics. The control group was asked to describe the experience of watching television. Members of the second group were asked to “describe the emotion that the thought of your own death arouses in you” and to “jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die and once you are physically dead.”
Both groups were then asked to read and evaluate a short essay praising Bush and endorsing the war in Iraq. Most of the people in the television group disagreed with the essay. Most of those in the death group agreed with it. Math nerds will be interested to know that the effect size was both large (η2 = .55) and statistically significant (p < .001).
In the second experiment, the subjects were divided into three groups. In order to prime their subconscious thought patterns, one group was assigned to write about death, another about 9/11, and the third, the control group, about pain. (The scientists substituted “pain” for “watching television” to make sure that Bush’s bump in the first experiment came from thinking about death specifically and not just from thinking about something unpleasant. If I were conducting the experiment, instead of pain, I would have made the unpleasant thing something very specific—like having to give Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell a foot rub.)
Support for President George W. Bush and presidential candidate John Kerry as a function of priming condition.
In this experiment, the subjects prompted to think about pain preferred Kerry by a more than a two-to-one margin. Those thinking about death or 9/11 preferred Bush by a landslide. The effect of thinking of death or 9/11 worked on liberals, moderates, and conservatives