Hillary's Tears

Susan Bandes

“The second debate, opening with CNN anchor Bernard Shaw's question to Michael Dukakis whether or not he would favor the death penalty for someone who raped and murdered his wife, was a crucial moment in the 1988 campaign. The question was meant to give Dukakis an opportunity to show emotion, but he blew it, and answered in a wooden, lawyerly manner.”

In both cases, the candidate’s affect communicated something that voters found important. Did these displays have any information value, or were the reactions to them disheartening proof that “feeling, not thinking” is all important for some voters? ( as Judith Warner said in this morning’s New York Times.)

Not that Warner is wrong to worry about the journalistic focus on superficial issues, or the voters’ capacity to choose the candidate we’d most like to drink beer with. But it’s worth considering whether these emotional displays might have some information value. Is feeling at odds with thinking when we evaluate a candidate? Here’s a first cut at sorting out some issues about the Hillary question:

There are two issues here that are often conflated. First, do these displays of emotion have any information value? Second, how reliable can such information be?

When we size people up, we look at affect. That isn’t a problem with our cognitive apparatus; it’s a legitimate and helpful way to obtain information about people. We don’t conduct presidential campaigns solely through written questions and answers, any more than we conduct trials that way. We want a chance to judge credibility, and we do it, in part, by judging non-verbal behavior. The interaction between these quick, intuitive judgments and more conscious, deliberative judgments is the focus of intense debate in the cognitive sciences. This is a fascinating and complex issue, which I can’t do justice to here. But the consensus is that both types of cognitive processing are necessary to good judgment.

The problem with evaluating affect is that we’re stuck evaluating the display, not the internal emotions. There’s been much discussion about whether Hillary’s moment was scripted. There is no foolproof way to see into the candidate’s soul. Or, as either George Burns or George Cukor said, “Sincerity is everything. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” But I don’t suppose I need to point out that the candidates’ actual words aren’t necessarily accurate reflections of their character either. It’s all information, and we do the best we can to evaluate it in light of everything else we know about the candidate.

So did we learn anything of substance from either defining moment? Here’s an argument that in both cases the affect was part of the answer to the substantive question. Dukakis demonstrated that he didn’t really understand what is at stake for many people who support the death penalty. As Dan Kahan and I have both argued, to have a real discussion about this issue, we need to acknowledge not just the doctrinal but the emotional concerns animating people’s strongly held positions. Dukakis treated the question like just another dry policy question. As for Clinton, one interpretation is that her tears, along with the words that accompanied them, did answer the question asked. How does she do what she does? She keeps going because she cares passionately about making our country a better place.

We need to evaluate the sincerity, accuracy and importance of these messages, and that isn’t easy. Affect, like language, can mislead. But it also conveys information we need.

Labels: emotion and cognition