Presidential Debates: Style Can Obscure Substance

Millions of viewers will tune in to the presidential debates tonight and in the coming weeks to hear what the candidates have to say. But if the candidates want potential voters to remember their message, they should pay close attention to their behavior as well.

In a recent study, co-authored with Texas Tech’s Erik P. Bucy, Zijian Harrison Gong, assistant professor of communication, examined the consequences of appropriate versus inappropriate nonverbal behavior displayed by candidates during the 2012 presidential debates. Their findings, “When style obscures substance: visual attention to display appropriateness in the 2012 presidential debates,” was published in Communication Monographs.

Gong defined inappropriate behavior as behavior that doesn’t jive with the intended message or tone of the setting.

“If I’m meeting with a friend for coffee, for instance, and I am dressed in a suit and being very formal, that is incongruent,” said Gong. “In a political setting, if one candidate is being attacked by the other, and they just smile, that displays as a positive behavior in a negative context.”

For the study, subjects were shown approximately one-minute video clips from the 2012 presidential debates sampled from the CSPAN archive, which used split-screen technology to show both candidates at once.

The segments showed instances where behavior was both congruent and incongruent with the setting. For instance, in the first debate when Republican candidate Mitt Romney attacks Democratic candidate President Barack Obama on his jobs policy, Obama is shown looking down and even smirking. But then in a clip from the third debate, when Romney attacks, Obama is seen firing back.

To monitor participants’ attention, they used eye tracking technology that shoots a small light into the eye and monitors movements of the cornea and lens. As people move their eyes from one part of the screen to another, the software shows what they are attending to. They also conducted focus groups to collect qualitative data.

What they found is that inappropriate behavior draws attention and that people tend to focus on inappropriate behaviors longer. They also found that people remember the substance of statements better when the speaker behaves appropriately and vice versa.

So even though inappropriate behavior may draw attention, Gong said it won’t necessarily gain approval.

In the focus groups, they showed the same clips to groups of potential voters, and the commentary supported the findings of the eye-tracking study.

To control for bias based on party preference, in which someone may inherently dislike the Democratic candidate because they are a Republican, they balanced participants’ political preferences between Republicans, Democrats and Independents.

Surprisingly, they found participants’ political affiliations did not make a difference. Participants consistently gave candidates a higher evaluation when their behavior was appropriate and a lower evaluation when it was inappropriate regardless of their party preference.

The research is particularly interesting since voters rely heavily on televised speeches and debates as a source of information about presidential candidates, but Gong said more research is needed before generalizations can be made.

“In reality there is a huge muddy middle. This study controlled extraneous factors to establish the causal relationship between inappropriate displays and attention, yet in reality these controlled factors may impact viewers' attention and voting decisions,” said Gong. “With that said, this study demonstrated the influence of nonverbal communication on how citizens perceive candidates and pointed out directions for future investigations.”

By Kiley Mallard, Writer/Editor

»This feature initially appeared in the Fall 2016 Journal. Read more.