Bregje Holleman

Right or Wrong? The Brain's Fast Response to Morally Objectionable Statements

How does the brain respond to statements that clash with a persons value system? We recorded event-related brain potentials while respondents from contrasting political-ethical backgrounds completed an attitude survey on drugs, medical ethics, social conduct, and other issues. Our results show that value-based disagreement is unlocked by language extremely rapidly, within 200 to 250 ms after the first word that indicates a clash with the readers value system (e.g., “I think euthanasia is an acceptable/unacceptable…”). Furthermore, strong disagreement rapidly influences the ongoing analysis of meaning, which indicates that even very early processes in language comprehension are sensitive to a persons value system. Our results testify to rapid reciprocal links between neural systems for language and for valuation.

Beyond young, highly educated males: A typology of VAA users

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are Web tools that are used to inform increasing numbers of voters during elections. This increasing usage indicates that VAAs fulfill voters’ needs, but what these needs are is unknown. Previous research has shown that such tools are primarily used by young males and highly educated citizens. This suggests that VAAs are generally used by citizens who are already well-informed about politics and may not need the assistance of a VAA to make voting decisions. To analyze the functions that VAAs have for their users, this study utilizes unique user data from a popular Dutch VAA to identify different user types according to their cognitive characteristics and motivations. A latent class analysis (LCA) resulted in three distinct user types that vary in efficacy, vote certainty, and interest: doubters, checkers, and seekers. Each group uses the VAA for different reasons at different points in time. Seekers’ use of VAAs increases as Election Day approaches; less efficacious and less certain voters are more likely to use the tool to become informed.

Agree or Disagree? : Cognitive processes in answering contrastive survey questions

Survey designers have long assumed that respondents who disagree with a negative question (“This policy is bad.”: Yes or No; 2-point scale) will agree with an equivalent positive question (“This policy is good.”: Yes or No; 2-point scale). However, experimental evidence has proven otherwise: Respondents are more likely to disagree with negative questions than to agree with positive ones. To explain these response effects for contrastive questions, the cognitive processes underlying question answering were examined. Using eye tracking, the authors show that the first reading of the question and the answers takes the same amount of time for contrastive questions. This suggests that the wording effect does not arise in the cognitive stages of question comprehension and attitude retrieval. Rereading a question and its answering options also takes the same amount of time, but happens more often for negative questions. This effect is likely to indicate a mapping difference: Fitting an opinion to the response options is more difficult for negative questions.

Stemadvies via Internet: antwoorden, attitudes, stemintenties

In September 2012, the NWO-project Voting Advice Via Internet has started. In this research project, we investigate, among other things, how various wording aspects of voting advice applications (VAAs) influence the answers given to the VAA statements. The current article investigates the effects of two wording aspects: valence framing (“Wearing niqabs in public should be forbidden” vs. “Wearing niqabs in public should be allowed”) and issue framing (is a statement on niqabs placed under the heading of “immigration” or “integration”?). Results show that respondents more often give disagreeing answers to negatively worded questions, than agreeing answers to equivalent positive questions. This effect occurs for about one in every three questions. The effect of issue framing occurs for only one in eight questions. When an effect of issue framing occurs, we find respondents answering in correspondence with the frame chosen: when the financial aspects of an issue are foregrounded (“finance”), respondents answer more “rightist” as compared to when social aspects are made salient (“care”).

Positive vs. Negative : The Impact of Question Polarity in Voting Advice Applications

Online Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are survey-like instruments that help citizens to shape their political preferences and compare them with those of political parties. Especially in multi-party democracies, their increasing popularity indicates that VAAs play an important role in opinion formation for citizens, as well as in the public debate prior to elections. Hence, the objectivity and transparency of VAAs are crucial. In the design of VAAs, many choices have to be made. Extant research in survey methodology shows that the seemingly arbitrary choice to word questions positively (e.g., ‘The city council should allow cars into the city centre’) or negatively (‘The city council should ban cars from the city centre’) systematically affects the answers. This asymmetry in answers is in line with work on negativity bias in other areas of linguistics and psychology. Building on these findings, this study investigated whether question polarity also affects the answers to VAA statements. In a field experiment (N = 31,112) during the Dutch municipal elections we analysed the effects of polarity for 16 out of 30 VAA statements with a large variety of linguistic contrasts. Analyses show a significant effect of question wording for questions containing a wide range of implicit negations (such as ‘forbid’ vs. ‘allow’), as well as for questions with explicit negations (e.g., ‘not’). These effects of question polarity are found especially for VAA users with lower levels of political sophistication. As these citizens are an important target group for Voting Advice Applications, this stresses the need for VAA builders to be sensitive to wording choices when designing VAAs. This study is the first to show such consistent wording effects not only for political attitude questions with implicit negations in VAAs, but also for political questions containing explicit negations.

Begrijpelijke Taal en Effectieve Communicatie II

This special issue presents an overview of the outcomes of the research programme called Comprehensible Language and Effective Communication (Dutch National Science Foundation, 2011-2016). This programme aimed to stimulate fundamental and applied research on comprehensible and effective communication. A core characteristic of the programme was private-public cooperation: profit and non-profit organisations contributed to the programme and to the research projects within the program. A second characteristic of the programme was its interdisciplinarity. The research projects combined expertise from linguistic communication, communication science, health communication, political communication and education. The projects focused on a variety of domains in which comprehensibility is crucial, such as communication about personal finance and health. The articles in this special issue provide an overview of some core results.

I Don't Know. The Effect of Question Polarity on No-opinion Answers

A new type of political attitude survey that has gained popularity in Europe and in the United States is the voting advice application (VAA). VAAs provide users with a voting advice based on their answers to a set of attitude questions. In the calculation of this advice, no-opinion answers are excluded. We tested the hypothesis that negative VAA questions lead to more no-opinion answers than their positive equivalents. In a field experiment, visitors (N=41,505) of a VAA developed for the municipality of Utrecht in the Netherlands, were randomly guided to one of the versions of the tool in which the polarity of 16 questions was manipulated. Results do not show an overall effect of question polarity. This overall null finding appears to be caused by contrasting effects for two subtypes of negative questions: Explicit negatives (e.g. not allow) yield more no-opinion answers than their positive counterparts (e.g. allow) do, while the reverse holds for implicit negatives (e.g. forbid).

Inwisselbaar of niet

In Stemwijzer, the Netherlands’ most popular Voting Advice Application, users express their opinions to political statement on a three-point scale (agree, neither of both, disagree) supplemented with a no-opinion answer (skip this question). Based on these answers, Stemwijzer gives a voting advice: it computes which political party’s or parties’ viewpoints have most similarities with the user’s views. The current research is aimed at determining whether VAA users use the middle response option and the non-response option the way they are meant; the middle response option should indicate an attitude in the middle of the scale, expressing ambivalence or a dilemma. This attitude is included in the voting advice, whereas the non-response option indicates a non-attitudinal response that is not taken into account in the voting advice. To investigate how the middle response option and non-response option are used, inhabitants of the city of Helmond were asked to fill out a VAA (N = 55); some while thinking aloud (N = 20). In addition, all participants were interviewed about their answer choices afterwards. Results show that functions of the middle response option and non-response option are interchangeable. However, when explicitly asked to describe these functions, VAA users are better able to make a distinction. Results also show that VAA users are unaware of the consequences a choice for the middle response option or the non-response option has for the voting advice. All in all, the findings show that users too often choose the middle response instead of the non-response option.