The November 16th Lab Seminar was led by Edmond J. Safra Lab Fellow Michael Jones, whose research is conducted in conjunction with Professor Dan Kahan of Yale Law School and the Cultural Cognition Project. Their project examines the ways that cultural cognition impacts how people process information about campaign finance reform. Based on their research thus far, they have found that while people are not generally informed about campaign finance and how it connects to issues they care about, they are generally oriented toward reform. Given that understanding, the next stage of their project will attempt to determine the ways that narrative,
and manipulations of the narrative form, may be used to educate people about campaign finance in a way that mitigates bias assimilation (confirmation and disconfirmation bias).
Working with the basic assumption that narratives are comprised of a setting, plot, characters (including “heroes” and “villains”) and a moral of the story, Jones demonstrated how narrative could be used as a method of conveying information about campaign finance, with relevant facts and legal guidelines providing the setting, and a policy solution as the moral of the story. These aspects of the narrative could be manipulated according to the predispositions of the reader, and whether they tend toward Hierarch-Individualist, Hierarch-Communitarian, Egalitarian-Individualist, or Egalitarian-Communitarian. By tying campaign finance to the issues that each group finds salient, such narratives may be able to overcome the biases that affect the way people assimilate information.
In their discussion, seminar participants raised questions about how the plot of the story may influence the effect of the narrative on the reader. Jones pointed out that with institutional corruption, the plot usually refers to good people who have been corrupted by a bad system, with no individual to blame. While narratives that frame the problem as one of bad people doing bad things may be more effective at evoking a response from the reader, the more difficult problem is to generate a response to the problem of good people acting within a corrupt system. Participants also wondered how to frame the villain in the good person/corrupt system narrative, and debated how effective it might be to cast the system as the villain, instead of an individual.
The seminar closed with participants offering further thoughts on narrative construction, including suggestions for creating narratives within narratives as a way of diminishing the effect of bias on the readers’ response.
- Summary written by Jennifer Campbell