Richard R. Lau

The Effects of Negative Political Advertisements: A Meta-Analytic Assessment

T he conventional wisdom about negative political advertisements holds that no one likes them, but they work, that is, they have the consequences their sponsors intend. Moreover, many analysts have expressed concern over the detrimental effects of such negativism on the American political system. We examine the accuracy of the conventional wisdom and the legitimacy of the fears about the consequences for the political system via meta-analysis, a systematic, quantitative review of the literature. The data do not support either contention. Negative political ads appear to be no more effective than positive ads and do not seem to have especially detrimental effects on the political system. Eleven subsidiary hypotheses about particular circumstances in which significant effects are likely to be found are tested and rejected. Discussion focuses on why negative political advertisements have become so popular in practice when there is so little evidence that they work especially well.

The Effects of Negative Political Campaigns: A Meta-Analytic Reassessment

The conventional wisdom about negative political campaigning holds that it works, i.e., it has the consequences its practitioners intend. Many observers also fear that negative campaigning has unintended but detrimental effects on the political system itself. An earlier meta-analytic assessment of the relevant literature found no reliable evidence for these claims, but since then the research literature has more than doubled in size and has greatly improved in quality. We reexamine this literature and find that the major conclusions from the earlier meta-analysis still hold. All told, the research literature does not bear out the idea that negative campaigning is an effective means of winning votes, even though it tends to be more memorable and stimulate knowledge about the campaign. Nor is there any reliable evidence that negative campaigning depresses voter turnout, though it does slightly lower feelings of political efficacy, trust in government, and possibly overall public mood.

Common Sense Representations of Common Illnesses

Evidence is provided that common sense representations of common illnesses involve five components: (1) a label; (2) consequences; (3) a time line; (4) a cause; and (5) a cure. The last two components, attributions for getting sick and for getting better, can be conceptualized along the familiar dimensions of stability, locus, and controllability. The content of schemas for ones most recent illness are shown to have small but significant effects on changes in health locus of control beliefs but not on preventive health behaviors. It is suggested that if people consistently employ the same schemas for every disease they experience, then cumulatively schematic processing could have very large effects on health beliefs and health behaviors. It is further suggested that if the same illness schemas are employed when major diseases are encountered, then schemas based on the experience of minor illnesses could have dramatic and much more immediate effects on morbidity and mortality. The germ model of disease suggests that people get sick when an external, organic agent (a germ) somehow invades the body. When people are sick, they experience unpleasant symptoms, which motivates them to visit a physician. The physician cures the disease by killing the germs, often with the purposive introduction of another external organic agent, a drug or medicine. However, health researchers have long known that this simple germ model of disease is not a very satisfactory representation of the disease experience for many of us. Peoples subjective experience with any given disease varies a great deal more than is suggested by the simple determinacy of the germ model. For example, people differ in how frequently they complain about different symptoms (Desroches, Kaiman, & Ballard, 1967; Suchman, 1965; Zborowski, 1952; Zola, 1966) and in their propensity to

Negativity in political perception

The tendency for negative information to have more weight than equally extreme or equally likely positive information appears in a variety of cognitive processing tasks, but has rarely been documented empirically in politics. This paper provides evidence for two types of negativity effects in electoral behavior: negativity in the formation of impressions (of Humphrey and Nixon in 1968, of McGovern and Nixon in 1972, and of Carter and Reagan in 1980), and negativity as a consequence of impressions (in the 1974 and 1978 congressional elections). Both post hoc rationalization and the nonequivalence of the positive and negative information were examined and ruled out as artifactual explanations for these results. Discussion centered around two possible explanations for negativity, a cost-orientation hypothesis (which holds that people are more strongly motivated to avoid costs than to approach gains) and a figure-ground hypothesis (which holds that negative information stands out against a general positive background).

Health as a value: methodological and theoretical considerations

The concept of value placed on health is very important in several different theoretical approaches to the study of health behavior. In practice, however, health value is generally assumed to be universally high rather than being directly measured. If this assumption is incorrect, then theories that include health value have rarely been adequately tested. This paper presents a short 4-item Likert scale designed to measure the value placed on health. Norms from the utilization of this scale in five different samples are presented. Health value is found to increase with age among girls, but the increase apparently stops by late adolescence, before full adult levels of health value are achieved. Middle-aged women place a higher value on health than do middle-aged men, although no comparable sex difference appears in a sample of undergraduates. Consistent with theoretical predictions, both health locus of control beliefs and beliefs in the efficacy of certain preventive health behaviors correlate more highly with the performance of those same behaviors 5 to 9 months later among respondents who place a high value of health relative to those who do not value health so highly. However, this interaction is found only when it can be safely assumed that health is the primary value underlying the behavior. The importance of considering a variety of values in addition to health as possible motivators of preventive health behavior is stressed.

Origins of health locus of control beliefs.

A burgeoning literature is discovering the links between locus of control beliefs and a variety of different health beliefs, health behaviors, and health itself. If locus of control beliefs are important to health, it is crucial to understand where those beliefs come from. This study explored the origins of health locus of control (HLC) beliefs, using the Lau-Ware multidimensional HLC battery. A structural equations analysis showed that beliefs in Self-Control Over Health were positively related to early health habits involving self-care and medical professionals and negatively related to prior family experiences with sickness. Beliefs in Provider Control Over Health were positively related to early health habits involving medical professionals and negatively related to prior sickness experiences in ones family. Beliefs in Chance Health Outcomes were positively related to prior sickness experiences, however, supporting a view of HLC beliefs as fairly stable individual-difference measures developed relatively early in life.

CONSTRUCT ACCESSIBILITY AND ELECTORAL CHOICE

Chronic accessibility refers to a long-term bias to notice, process, and have available for recall certain types of information across a variety of different stimulus objects in a variety of different situations. This paper illustrates the usefulness of studying the chronic accessibility of political constructs in the field of political behavior. The chronic accessibility of four generic political constructs are operationalized: candidates, issues, groups, and parties. The accessibility of these four political constructs is shown to be relatively stable over time and to guide the processing of information about a wide variety of political objects. Next, a voting model is tested that identifieswhich voters will rely chiefly on issue orientations, group orientations, candidate orientations, and/or party orientations in making their vote decision. The voting model is validated across two distinct ways of operationalizing the political chronicities and three different election studies spanning a 28-year period. Finally, although this paper has focused onindividual political behavior, several ways that an information processing approach could shed light on macrolevel political questions are discussed.

Cognitive links between economic grievances and political responses

Changes in the economy are associated with changes in support for the incumbent President (or members of his party) at the aggregate level but not generally at the individual level. That is, thepersonal impact of economic hardships has only rarely been linked to individual political responses. This paper finds again that various indicators of personal economic grievances are not in general associated with either economic policy preferences or support for President Carter. However, some rare circumstances in which the personal impact of economic grievances did have more power were identified, specifically when voters blamed the President for their economic hardships. Support was also found for Kinder and Kiewiets (1979) notion that collective judgments about the health of the economy, rather than ones personal economic situation, drive political responses.

The Meaning and Measure of Policy Metaphors

The apparent ability of the American public to form coherent assessments of policy options—while being largely ignorant of political institutions, actors, and ideology—remains a persistent puzzle for political science. We develop a theory of political decision making that helps resolve this puzzle. We postulate that both the public and political elites comprehend complex policies in part through “reasoning by policy metaphor,” which involves comparisons between proposed alternative policies and more readily understood social institutions. Using data from 169 intensive interviews, we test claims about metaphorical reasoning for a particularly complex policy domain: health care reform. We demonstrate that our hypothesized policy metaphors are coherent to both elites and the general public, including the least sophisticated members of the public. We further show that elites and the public share a common understanding of the relevant policy metaphors, that metaphorical reasoning differs from other forms of analogic reasoning, and that metaphorical cognition is distinct from ideological orientation.

Beliefs about Control and Health Behavior

The desire to control one’s environment and the events in one’s life is a very general human motive. It plays a central role in several basic (although very different) theories of personality and social psychology (e.g., Bandura, 1977; de Charms, 1968; Fromm, 1941; Kelley, 1967; White, 1959). Because the desire for control is such a general motivation, beliefs about whether one has control over one’s life have attracted much research interest. The research that is relevant to health falls into three main categories. The first addresses the question of the extent to which control reduces the stressfulness of an aversive event. The second type of research looks at the results of an attributional style known as “learned helplessness.” The third category of research includes those studies that look at more generalized beliefs about control as an individual difference or personality factor. This chapter will briefly review the first two of these theoretical orientations before delving more deeply into the third individual difference or “locus of control” approach. A brief summary at the end of this chapter will attempt to tie these three orientations together again.