POL SCI 164A Lecture Notes - Lecture 25: Recognition Heuristic, Anthony Downs, Political Psychology
30 Apr 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
PS 164A Lecture 4/26
Campaigning
● Politicians are held in such poor esteem
● Politicians speaking on their own ads is a problem - it’s usually not them talking
○ Self-narrating is more likely to be a woman
○ Voters trust female politicians to be more sincere than male politicians
● Contrast learning
○ Show differences or contrasts between things
○ It is a better way to learn, especially comparisons that go line by line
○ Positive ads vs negative (attack) ads
■ Negative ad builds contrast
■ Negative attack ads build anxiety which leads to learning
■ Two caveats to negative ads working better:
● Even if we don’t think they’re more effective, candidates do
● Every time you construct a new one, you get more media
coverage on attack ads and contrast ads
● Recognition heuristic
Media
● As emphasis goes up, priority placed on the subject/problem goes up with public and ell
as resolving the subject/problem
● As emphasis goes up, the salience of consideration goes up and affects attitudes formed
through the CCM, shifts the attitude
● Agenda-setting: the dependent variable is always about how hard the problem is to solve
and how much effort it should be given by the public
● The media has enormous power over what to cover and how much cover to give it
● The standard schema based biases that can restrict persuasion is completely bypassed
by determining what information is readily available
● Studying the relation of how much something is covered and how much the public thinks
that it is a problem
○ More coverage → viewed as a bigger problem
The Discovery of ____
● About the selectivity of media
● Tom Brokaw - chose specific news stories
Attention Cycle
● Anthony Downs
● Many problems, you can never get rid of them
○ Mass shootings/school shootings
