Papers by Solomon Messing
… of the 2009 American Political Science …, Jan 1, 2009
In a typical election, campaigns deliver many controversial ads to the public. Some contain cues ... more In a typical election, campaigns deliver many controversial ads to the public. Some contain cues that play on implicit attitudes-automatic associations of attributes with people who belong to a particular group. Ads that link a candidate to negative implicit attitudes can affect the way people vote (Valentino et al. 2002). Although it is clear that politicians alter images of their opponents to make them look "bad" (Jamieson 1992), the extent to which today's political campaigns systematically employ cues associated with negative implicit attitudes in attack ads has not been documented.
Despite strong evidence linking skin tone to negative stereotypes and adverse realworld outcomes,... more Despite strong evidence linking skin tone to negative stereotypes and adverse realworld outcomes, there have been few attempts to extend these findings to the realm of electoral politics. Voters learn about a candidate's appearance primarily through televsion and the web, suggesting that more stereotypicial depictions of a candidate that air in political advertisements may be associated with a skin-tone penalty at the ballot box. Furthermore, the literature suggests that because these processes operate at the level of implicit social cognition, few may be aware that anything other than ordinary political advertising is taking place. We devised a method that allows us to quantitatively assess (1) the extent to which the 2008 McCain and Obama campaigns depicted their opponents in attack advertisements in ways that play on the public's implicit attitudes about race in the case of Obama and age in the case of McCain; and (2) assess the public's affective response to various depictions of each candidate, presented via the Affect Misattribution Procedure. Our findings suggest that the 2008 presidential campaigns selected or altered images in ways that can play on the public's implicit attitudes about race and age; and that such differences between photographs can change a voter's affective response to an image of the same candidate in the expected direction at the height of campaign season when so many political issues are salient-even during the same sitting and even when the candidate is well-known-a surprise in light of the existing findings in the literature. * Departments of Communication 1 and Electrical Engineering 2 , Stanford University. Thanks to Shanto Iyengar who provided the initial inspiration and many of the key ideas for this paper; John Walker, who collected the ads and made other useful suggestions regarding measurement; Taylor Young, Truc Nguyen, Alicia Solow-Niederman and Kimberly Rosenblum who helped code the images; Jonathan Wand, Jeremy Bailenson, who provided valuable analytical insight; and Matthew DeBell, who suggested that I investigate the 2008 ANES data, which included the AMP. R-code used for data processing and analysis is available upon request.
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Skin color is an explicit racial cue. Although there is strong evidence linking darker skin compl... more Skin color is an explicit racial cue. Although there is strong evidence linking darker skin complexion to the activation of racial stereotypes and adverse societal outcomes, little is known about the extent to which this effect is in play during political campaigns. If white voters make use of this skin complexion cue, we would expect exposure to darker images of a minority candidate to result in a "dark-skin penalty" at the ballot box. We investigate the impact of skin complexion on support for Barack Obama at two different stages of the 2008 campaign: Study 1 occurred during the primary campaign and Study 2 during the closing stages of the general election. Our findings suggest that when citizens are still learning about a minority candidate's personal background, subtle changes in skin complexion can have an effect on evaluations of that candidate and that citizens with higher levels of implicit racial bias are less likely to prefer a darker-skinned minority candidate.
Future political communication research will depend on measuring issue-salience in massive data s... more Future political communication research will depend on measuring issue-salience in massive data sets largely consisting of unstructured text. We examine a set of supervised machine-learning approaches that can categorize short segments of unstructured text data based on human judgments of content, with an attractive cost structure. We achieve levels of accuracy that are generally acceptable in human-coder content analysis, and which has perfect replicability once human coders produce appropriate training data. We use this approach to classify free responses to the "most important problem" question from the 2000 NAES rolling cross section, and show that our results generally correspond to exogenous real-world events that are widely thought to have shifted the attention of the public.
Much of the literature on polarization and selective exposure presumes that the internet exacerba... more Much of the literature on polarization and selective exposure presumes that the internet exacerbates the fragmentation of the media and the citizenry. Yet, this ignores how the widespread use of social media changes news consumption. Social media provide readers a choice of stories from different sources that come recommended from politically heterogeneous individuals, in a context that emphasizes social value over partisan affiliation. Building on existing models of news selectivity to emphasize information utility, we hypothesize that social media’s distinctive feature, social endorsements, trigger several decision heuristics that suggest utility. In two experiments, we demonstrate that stronger social endorsements increase the probability that people select content, and that their presence reduces partisan selective exposure to levels indistinguishable from chance.
Package 'wvioplot'
... Version 0.1 Date 2010-5-29 Title Weighted violin plot Author Solomon Messing <solomon.... more ... Version 0.1 Date 2010-5-29 Title Weighted violin plot Author Solomon Messing <solomon.messing @gmail.com> Maintainer Solomon Messing <[email protected]> Depends Hmisc Description A violin plot is a combination of a box plot and a kernel density plot. ...
Of course I wouldn't do that in real life: advancing the arguments for increasing realism in HCI experiments
Proceedings of the 2011 …, Jan 1, 2011
Abstract We offer a nuanced examination of the way that realism can impact internal and external ... more Abstract We offer a nuanced examination of the way that realism can impact internal and external validity in HCI experiments. We show that if an HCI experiment lacks realism across any of four dimensionsappearance, content, task and settingthe lack of realism can confound the ...
Explicit Racial Cues and Candidate Preference: The Case of Skin Complexion in the 2008 Campaign
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Papers by Solomon Messing