When The Daily Show's Jon Stewart told CNN's Crossfire hosts that their form of combative political commentary was "hurting America," he was on to something. And when CNN/US President Jonathan Klein agreed and canceled the show, he also might have sensed what new research is getting at: "In-your-face" television has the capacity to polarize viewers on political issues and turn people off of the political process.
Looking for the source of political polarization, Diana Mutz, a political-science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, was skeptical that political discourse in this country has really taken a dive toward boorishness. Citing last year's challenge by Democratic Senator Zell Miller, she said, "We haven't had a duel in a good long time. It's not clear that politicians are acting any different today as in the past."
But what has changed in the last 50 years has been the way Americans get to know their candidates. Voters used to gather in town squares and watch politicians live and in person. Now citizens welcome their favorite candidates into their homes on television. And during the last decade, rancorous "debate" shows such as The O'Reilly Factor and Crossfire have gained in popularity, bringing obnoxious behavior up close and personal.
When faced with confrontation in person, people tend to back off to preserve their personal space. But when conflicts break out on television, the camera zooms in. Close-ups don't allow us to step back, making the experience somewhat unnatural. Mutz and her colleagues wanted to know what effect incivility in televised political debates had on viewers. Their results were published this month in The American Political Science Review and presented at last month's meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C.
To make certain that they were studying people's reactions to impolite behavior and not political viewpoints, the researchers scripted a political debate and had actors perform as candidates in front of TV cameras. In one filming, the actors were courteous during the debate. In another, the actors used mostly nonverbal cues to turn the discourse uncivil: One actor-candidate would roll his eyes, scowl, or shake his head while the other talked. In addition, Mutz set up multiple cameras to film both long views and close-ups. She asked a professional talk-show editor to produce a show with as realistic a feel as possible.
Then the researchers covered volunteers in electrodes to measure how much arousal the shows caused, and interviewed the participants after they watched one of the debate versions. The researchers found that the viewers found the uncivil show more arousing and entertaining than the well-mannered gabfest -- which was "boring beyond belief," Mutz said, even though the content was exactly the same as the snippy one. But at the same time, post-show interviews revealed that loutish debate behavior caused a significant decline in the viewers' trust in politicians, Congress, and government in general. "Politicians appear far more trustworthy if they maintain civility," said Mutz.
Mutz also compared reactions to close-ups and longer views. Both close-ups and gruffness increased the arousal of people watching debates, and in-your-face rancor stimulated the most passion by far. "People really, really liked the uncivil version of this program," said Mutz. But increased arousal didn't translate to better-informed: The team found that those who watched the raucous shows thought that the candidate who had views contrary to their own had a less legitimate stance. Yet such viewers had a harder time reconstructing the argument than those who had watched the polite debate.
"We don't really know how people respond to political media, and Mutz is finding out at the ground level for the first time," said Arthur Lupia, a professor at the University of Michigan's Center for Political Studies in Ann Arbor. "Television is now putting more and more people in our face, and those technical changes have real consequences." Those consequences might be at times helpful, such as the emotional response to the recent tsunamis, and at other times harmful, as Mutz's results show.
But it's far too soon to know how or even whether in-your-face television has polarized the political landscape, according to Carolyn Funk, a social psychologist at the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in Washington. "It's not at all clear what the overall effects are for society," she said. The work raises the question of how extensive such incivility is, and whether it's inflicted on an unwilling populace. Mutz also showed that ungracious politicians lost more of the trust of those who avoid conflict than of those who delight in rough debate. And Funk said that people who gravitate toward aggressive political shows generally enjoy conflict. "There's lots of evidence that people who like conflict are the ones viewing these kinds of shows," she said.
While political scientists and social psychologists work out the details of how television affects the political process, Mutz is considering bringing television producers and scientists together to work on how to make politics on TV interesting and engaging but not harmful to the electorate. As an example, she mentioned a Canadian news show called Naked News, where anchors disrobe to keep viewers engaged through the day's top stories. While voters probably don't want to see their politicians nude, creative minds might be able to come up with a novelty to draw the public back to the process.
Mary Beckman is a freelance science writer who has worked for Science and Smithsonian. She lives in southeast Idaho.
