Sentient Insight: the business blog for consumer psychology and consumer marketing

“Economic Unrest is Shifting Electoral Battlegrounds” – front page headline New York Times, Sunday October 5th. The trouble with this headline lies in the meaning of what the word “is” is. “Is” indicates causality in this case, and is clearly spoken out of turn. The article claims that the cause of the recent turn in the electoral map toward Barack Obama is a result of (that is, is caused by) the worsening economic climate over the past month.

If expectational influence on subsequent judgment were ever on public display, we saw it in nearly every analyst on television Thursday evening following the Vice Presidential debate. Sarah Palin’s performance in the debate was much better than what we saw in the clips from the Katie Couric interview. But really, where was there to go, for a Vice Presidential candidate, but up? The leading edge of psychological science tells us that expectations play a strong role in how we perceive the world. Lowering expectations, and subsequently beating those expectations will provide you with more lift in positive experience  perceptions than meeting higher expectations altogether (Kunda, 1999). Still, shouldn’t we expect our best political analysts to get beyond this?