Statistics

Does Exposure To American Flag Shift Support Toward Republicanism?

It was just two red-white-and-blue weeks ago that we learned, via some Hahvard dons, that attending Fourth of July parades was likely to make one develop Republican sympathies. This finding was widely reported in the press, but it was clear that no reporters bothered reading past the abstract of the dons’ paper.

Because if they did, they would have discovered that the method the professors used to “prove” their contention was absurd. They did not measure actual parade attendance and actual voting behavior, they instead examined weather records and noted whether it rained on the Fourth when the interviewees were tykes, and then asked the interviewees how they felt about political parties as adults. The dons assumed that if it rained, parade attendance was unlikely and therefore one was likely to turn into a Democrat (sort of an anti-full moon effect).

It’s happening again. Just yesterday we began hearing of a new study, this one purporting to show that even a brief glance at Old Glory was enough to tug heart strings to the right, even nigh unto eight months after being exposed to the American tricolor.

That sound plausible to you? Me neither. But the peers of Psychological Science who reviewed the paper of Carter, Ferguson, and Hassin were evidently convinced.

Here is what reporters saw (from the abstract):

We report that a brief exposure to the American flag led to a shift toward Republican beliefs, attitudes, and voting behavior among both Republican and Democratic participants, despite their overwhelming belief that exposure to the flag would not influence their behavior. In Experiment 1, which was conducted online during the 2008 U.S. presidential election, a single exposure to an American flag resulted in a significant increase in participants’ Republican voting intentions, voting behavior, political beliefs, and implicit and explicit attitudes, with some effects lasting 8 months after the exposure to the prime. In Experiment 2, we replicated the findings more than a year into the current Democratic presidential term. These results constitute the first evidence that nonconscious priming effects from exposure to a national flag can bias the citizenry toward one political party and can have considerable durability.

Sounds persuasive enough. Not let’s see how it was done.

The trio asked 396 people to participate in Experiment 1, which was of four sessions, from before the election to eight months after. Only 197 made it through Session 2, but just 71 made it to the end—and 8 participants were excluded because, apparently, they fibbed their on-line survey answers (p. 2, bottom). That, dear readers, leaves just 63 out of the original 396 from which to draw conclusions.

Even stranger was that these 63 were pre-selected to have polarized views. The researchers only used those folks “who planned to vote in a state where polling indicated that a significant margin separated Obama and McCain.” Good grief! And this was thought kosher by the peer reviewers.

Vote Republican!But never mind. The trio asked folks a bunch of questions (such as the “Patriotism and Nationalism Scale”, etc.). They also asked for whom these folks would vote, how they felt about that, and so forth. Some of the 63 got a “small picture (72 × 45 pixels) of an American flag…in the top left corner of the survey” and some others did not. By Session 4, the folks were asked how President Obama did, etc.

It is at this point where decisions of a statistical sort have to be made. Do we look at the rate of those who voted for McCain or Obama and whether they saw the flag? Or perhaps we tally the responses of the questions by flag “exposure.” Seems simple enough, and it would tell us directly if we’re on to something.

But this is science, where nothing is easy! Instead of doing it the plain way, the researchers added a twist:

We created composite measures of voting intentions for both Sessions 1 and 2 by calculating the difference between intentions to vote for McCain and intentions to vote for Obama; higher numbers indicate a greater intention to vote for McCain than for Obama. We then regressed the centered Session 2 intentions on centered Session 1 intentions and used the residuals from this analysis as our main measure of voting intentions.

In other words, toss out the actual answers and replace them with residuals from some weird linear regression model. They go on to create many other “composite” measures, by adding the result from this question to the result from that one, and so on.

And, lo, they discovered that those of the 63—minus, I think, those who did not actually vote for either McCain or Obama, leaving how many we don’t know—who saw the flag tended to disapprove of Obama’s eight-month-old presidency.

They did another experiment of the same sort, just as odd and convoluted as the first, and, after much manipulation, came to the same conclusion as before. Which is that a brief, one time viewing of a 72 × 45 pixel picture of an American flag is apt to turn one into a raving Republican.

See the picture above. Boo!

Categories: Statistics

13 replies »

  1. Even if the study was statistically faultless, the conclusion that the American flag was the cause of the difference is far from certain. Perhaps any flag would have an effect. Perhaps it is just the colors red white and blue – try British, French, Russian or Dutch flags as controls? I would be curious to see the effect of red and yellow Soviet Union or Chinese flags on the outcome of the survey.

  2. StephenPickering,

    You could have put yellow-polka-dotted fuchsia and it would have shown the same thing because the sample was pre-biased, and then self-selected.

  3. Briggs,

    Even a pre-biased and self selected sample may be subtly influenced by graphics. How do you think advertising works?

  4. Well, shoot. I was considering Obama in the upcoming election, but after seeing that flag in your post above, I can feel my tendency shifting toward the Republican candidates. Romney, Huntsman . . . who else is in there, uh, Bachmann . . . here we come!

  5. I interpret these results to mean that the sight of our beautiful american flag can heal the psyches of some deranged liberals.

    Similarly, depressed rained-on children do not grow up to be healthily republican adults.

    Or, you know, the pre-bias self-selection thing.

  6. I wish I could nominate Carter, Ferguson and Hassin for a Nobel prize, but I’m afraid what exposure to the Swedish flag at their award presentation might do to them. My God, they could go Blonde!

  7. Does this mean we can finally recognize the health hazards csecond from second-hand flag viewing?

  8. Dnag BHO everytime I plan to vote for him, he has to stand in fron of a teleprompter with flags in the background, just to make sooo hard for me.

  9. Perhaps we should not forget that in the social sciences the act of measurement can affect the outcome of the experiment.

    The flag viewing part of the study is, of itself, ridiculous. But the study is not about flag viewing alone: it is about the combination of flag viewing and the writing of political opinions. The writing part is very important. It fixes ideas in the mind. Repeating the processes reinforces those ideas and can make them more extreme.

    My view is that the test participants were not simply expressing their views, instead they were subject to a form of (self) indoctrination. It seems plausible that a flag viewing in that very special context could have long-lasting results. However, it does not follow at all that the same applies in a normal context. I would have expected the study authors to be more cautious in their conclusions.

  10. Statistics aside, this study sounds like it was concocted to justify removing flags from voting locations. I sincerely hope no tax payer dollars were granted to fund this study. Can you say “items which should be cut from the budget”.

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