Artful Dodging Beats Open Evasion

Today's Washington Post featured a fascinating column regarding how voters view candidates who change the subject on a questioner. As you'll recall, during the recent vice presidential debate, Sarah Palin was up-front about the fact that she might not answer the moderator's questions. According to the experts interviewed for this column, Palin would have been wiser to not telegraph her strategy.

The article points out that style still matters more than substance:

... The psychologists found that irrelevant answers delivered fluently and with poise scored higher with audiences than answers that were accurate, on-topic, but halting. And when they had actors deliver the same answers to audiences -- once fluently and once with "ums" and "ahs" -- audiences judged the hesitant responses as intellectually inferior to the fluent ones.

It also pointed out that most viewers don't notice when a politician doesn't answer a question:

Norton, at Harvard Business School, conducted an informal experiment during one debate: After the candidates gave their answers, Norton asked a group of friends to recall the question.

"They got a little bit better over the course of the evening, but by the time the politicians finished these two-minute all-over-the-place-answers, even people trying to focus forgot what question they were asked," he said.

Lastly, the column pointed out that voters reward candidates for slyly avoiding questions, as opposed to admitting to it:

Voters say they prefer candid politicians, but the experiments suggest politicians may pay a higher price for intellectual honesty than dishonesty.

"When [Palin] acknowledged the question and said, 'I don't want to talk about it,' it was intellectually honest, but it alerted people that she was not going to answer the question," said Rogers, a political psychologist and executive director of the Analyst Institute, a Washington-based group that studies voting behavior with an eye to helping liberals.