Election 2016          Social Desirability Bias / Feedback Dynamics:  Media’s Influence

The existence of Social Desirability Bias is concrete.  People tend to change answers on certain questions if they believe that their actual answer might not be socially acceptable.  What is not as concrete is the dynamic that makes people feel social pressure, enough to make them change their answers.

For some topics, it amounts to a lifetime of being told what you should or should not be doing.  Saving more money, exercising more often, eating better, practicing ‘appropriate’ sexual habits, and the list goes on.  People might have picked up an understanding what they think is a socially desirable answer from many different sources – a government survey, what they were taught in school, or social commentary with friends.  The point is that they likely accumulated this knowledge over years and it was ingrained fairly deeply into them to the point of making them change their answer.

When Social Desirability Bias relates to politics, the dynamic is much different.  Politics are very fluid and things change rapidly.  New politicians come and go.  Policies change.  Events can modify the political landscape in a single day.  This information is much shorter term in nature than those mentioned above that take years to ingest.  The feedback loop is shorter term for politics.  Assuming Social Desirability Bias exists in politics, which clearly seems to be the case, there must be a mechanism that can rapidly convince people what is considered socially acceptable and what is not.

The only mechanism that fits is the media, which we are using here to include TV, newspapers, and on-line sources.  Though social media has taken the lead over traditional media for dissemination of information for many stories, origination of news coverage still remains with the media.  Origination simply means that journalists still set the tone of the news stories and still chose which news stories are important enough to receive more coverage.  Social media can originate stories and talking points and does have a large impact on how people determine what is socially acceptable, especially within their own social or demographic group.  But, it is media that initially choses the direction and tone of the stories and normally social media expands, confirms, or contradicts these messages.

Such nuanced arguments might be too deep for our purposes here.  The point is that in order for Social Desirability Bias to work for shorter term topics that are more fluid, people need a reference point to determine the changing landscape of what is considered socially acceptable and what is not – media plays this role.

People are bombarded daily with news stories.  These stories for the most part have strong opinions attached.  Decades ago, this was not really the case.  News stories tended to be fairly bland and boring.  They gave you the who, what, why, when, where and how.  Opinions, especially strong ones, were relegated to the ‘Editorial Page’ or ‘Opinion Page’.  You knew that what you were reading was in fact filled with personal opinions which were completely separate from the real news stories in the rest of the newspaper.  For the most part, people read the news and made up their own minds.

Currently, there seems to be a general acceptance that media has become polarized.  Liberals complain about how one-sided Fox News is and conservatives roll their eyes at pretty much anything on MSNBC or in the New York Times.  In short, media news is no longer traditional boring news, it is filled with flashy opinion pieces.  Conservative focused news will reliably discuss how many different laws Clinton has broken and liberal focused news will reliably argue just how racist and misogynist Trump is.

With media as the feedback loop, people tend to learn very quickly what topics and positions can be considered socially acceptable.  This is not to say that people follow every single news item, but in general they, or at least those influenced by Social Desirability Bias, likely follow the main items and the general tone.

There can only really be an issue with Social Desirability Bias if the topic is very well laid out in explicit terms so that it is clear what positions are viewed as acceptable and such positions must be in contrast to the person’s true opinion.

The topic at hand and the media’s ability to focus on it, however, have limits.  No news story can remain in the news with the same intensity forever.  Furthermore, it seems that Social Desirability Bias grows with the media’s intensity of coverage and then begins to shrink back to neutral over time as coverage slips.

Another important point is that people do a very good job of associating topics and people.  So, if the media takes a strong stance on a politician and that politician ends up campaigning for second politician, some of that positive or negative bias will transfer to the second politician.

Summarizing:

• Media is still the only mechanism able to effectively transfer quickly enough which parties, candidates, and policies are social acceptable for national politics,
• Media sets the tone for political discourse and even filters topics discussed, further influencing Social Desirability Bias,
• Opinion leaders, though important, would have difficulty getting their message out without media access,
• Social media works better as a tool to confirm or contradict the media coverage,
• Social media can impact Social Desirability Bias, especially within linked groups, but to a lesser degree than media,
• Social Desirability Bias in politics tends to ebb and flow along with media coverage, in that increased media coverage and intensity of a topic will lead to increased Social Desirability Bias and decreasing coverage and intensity of a topic results in decreases of same,
• Social Desirability Bias in politics appears to be transferable in that people seem to associate social acceptance of people and topics fairly well.

These topics will be discussed in other posts with examples provided.