The futility of Obama's negation

Tyler Cowen notes that Barack Obama's response to Hillary Clinton's VP talk is unlikely to be effective:

Read this, the headline is "Obama: I'm no V.P.". That's not just the biased framing of the journalist, it captures Obama's words. My unsolicited advice is this: if you are a political candidate, proclaiming "I am not X" is not much better than admitting "I am X." Either way it frames the debate. And avoid phrases like "If I'm not ready [for the Presidency]..."

The classic example is Richard Nixon saying "I am not a crook." And indeed there is psychology research shows that the negation (i.e. "no" or "not") is frequently forgotten over time, as the Washington Post's Shankar Vendantam pointed out in 2004:

Experiments by Ruth Mayo, a cognitive social psychologist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, also found that for a substantial chunk of people, the "negation tag" of a denial falls off with time. Mayo's findings were published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2004.

"If someone says, 'I did not harass her,' I associate the idea of harassment with this person," said Mayo, explaining why people who are accused of something but are later proved innocent find their reputations remain tarnished. "Even if he is innocent, this is what is activated when I hear this person's name again.

"If you think 9/11 and Iraq, this is your association, this is what comes in your mind," she added. "Even if you say it is not true, you will eventually have this connection with Saddam Hussein and 9/11."

Mayo found that rather than deny a false claim, it is better to make a completely new assertion that makes no reference to the original myth. Rather than say, as Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) recently did during a marathon congressional debate, that "Saddam Hussein did not attack the United States; Osama bin Laden did," Mayo said it would be better to say something like, "Osama bin Laden was the only person responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks" -- and not mention Hussein at all.

The psychologist acknowledged that such a statement might not be entirely accurate -- issuing a denial or keeping silent are sometimes the only real options.

I'm not a fan of politicians using advanced framing tactics; my interest in this research concerns its implications for correcting myths like the supposed connection between Iraq and al Qaeda.

Anyway, here's the abstract from Mayo's paper for those who are interested:

‘‘I am not guilty’’ vs ‘‘I am innocent’’: Successful negation may depend on the schema used for its encoding
Ruth Mayo, Yaacov Schul, and Eugene Burnstein

Negations (e.g., ‘‘Jim is not guilty’’) are part of our daily language and communication. Linguistic and non-linguistic negations can occur when receivers counter-argue what communicators are saying, when hypotheses are disconfirmed, or through negative cognitive responses and many other social interactive processes. Our study explores how negations are encoded by considering the predictions of two theoretical models. According to the fusion model, the core of a negated message and the negation marker are integrated into one meaningful unit. Thus, Jim in the example might be encoded within the schema ‘‘innocence.’’ According to the schema-plus-tag model, a negated message is represented as a core supposition and a negation tag, allowing for dissociation of the two at a later point in time. We compare the two models by examining the nature of inferences that are facilitated by negations. Our results show that the existence of a schema that accommodates the meaning of the original negation is critical in determining how a negation will be encoded. When such a schema is not readily available, processing a negated message facilitates negation–incongruent associations, in line with predictions of the schema-plus-tag model. This model is also supported by analyses of respondents' memory. We discuss implications of these findings for the communication of negated information, for discounting theories, and for the assessment of the truth of incoming information.

Comments

[Raleighite]

This research supports other studies that tell us the mind can't "process" a negative and simply hears the positive portion of the message.
We learned, when our kids were very young, to say, "Hold your cup carefully" rather than "DON'T spill your juice!" And, "Please remember to..." rather than "Don't forget to..." It makes a difference!