Do political yard signs actually do anything?

This episode explores the effectiveness and psychological impact of political yard signs in elections.

1. Political yard signs can influence voters through the psychological concept of perceptual fluency, where familiarity breeds favorability.
2. In low-information elections, signs can sway voter preference by up to ten percentage points.
3. The effectiveness of yard signs diminishes when voters have access to more comprehensive information about the candidates.
4. Yard signs might contribute to a "noisy" visual environment, which some find unpleasant or overwhelming.
5. The episode challenges the notion of rational, fully-informed electoral decisions and suggests that many voters rely on heuristic, subconscious cues.

1. Introduction to the Topic

Discusses the ubiquitous presence of political yard signs and introduces the main question of their effectiveness. PJ Vogt: "What's going on with these yard signs? Like, do they work?"

2. Expert Insight

Features Dr. Cindy Cam, who explains the psychological effects of name recognition via perceptual fluency. Cindy Cam: "Perceptual fluency means that the more you're exposed to something, the more familiar it becomes."

3. Experimental Evidence

Covers laboratory and field experiments that assess the impact of yard signs on voter behavior. Cindy Cam: "We find a ten percentage point increase in willingness to vote for a candidate if his name was subliminally shown."

4. Real-World Application

Describes a field study using yard signs at a local school to measure real-world impact. Cindy Cam: "It turns out that Ben Griffin received a ten percentage point increase among those who saw his signs."

5. Conclusions and Implications

Discusses the implications of these findings for democracy and voter behavior. Cindy Cam: "We need to understand how decisions are actually made in order to improve the democratic process."

1. Consider the visual impact of political signs in your community.
2. Educate voters about the importance of researching candidates beyond name recognition.
3. Use yard signs judiciously, especially in low-information contexts where they might have a significant impact.
4. Engage in discussions about the role of subconscious influences in voter behavior.
5. Encourage political engagement and informed voting, even in the absence of comprehensive candidate information.

It’s an election year and so Search Engine’s campaign desk is answering the questions you really want answers to: all the political yard signs in your neighbors’ yards … do they do anything besides make everyone like each other less?

People

PJ Vogt, Sarah Hazelke, Cindy Cam

Companies

Odyssey, Jigsaw Productions

Books

None

Guest Name(s):

None

Content Warnings:

None

This episode reveals that while yard signs can influence elections, their impact depends heavily on the level of information available to voters.

PJ Vogt

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Hello? Hello? Hi. One sec. My thing is messed up over here.

Sarah Hazelke

I'm just trying to fix it. I don't know why. Oh, okay. Can you hear me? Yeah.

PJ Vogt

Earlier this week, I was talking to a search engine listener named Sarah Hazelke. I'm always asking people to send in questions for the show. The thing I should warn you as. A listener, if you do this, I might call you with follow ups. Where are we talking from?

Sarah Hazelke

Where are you? I'm in my car outside of a library. I come here to use their Wi fi while my kid is at their little Montessori preschool program. Oh, that's really nice. Sarah lives in Chatham, New York.

PJ Vogt

We were talking Monday when everybody's small talk had been orbiting the same topic. What are you doing for the eclipse today? I don't know, actually, because the eclipse is during nap time. My kid naps really late, so I don't. Yeah, I don't know what we're gonna do.

I guess I can, like, look outside. And with a two and a half year old, an eclipse is not a reason to rouse a child. Absolutely not.

Sarah Hazelke

Okay, so tell me, what is your question? Yeah, so my question is, what's going on with these yard signs? Like, do they work? And why are there so many of them? And when you say yard signs, you mean, like, vote for blah, blah, blah, like the political yard signs?

Yeah, the political yard signs. Okay. This came up last year, which was just local elections, but we had a very contentious district attorney election, and it was just ridiculous. The number of signs. In her email to the show, Sarah had said that this question, it had come up a few times when talking to her friends and family, in particular, her mom was feeling upset about these signs.

PJ Vogt

The word rage was used. And how did you feel seeing the yard signs? Did you feel any way about them? I feel like it's a lot of visual clutter. I'm a visual artist, and so I pay attention to what I'm seeing out in the world.

And it just seemed like there were a lot of. There would be four signs for one of the candidates, and then a little bit later, like, there would be four for the other candidate, too. And now it's like, is it canceling them out? What's happening here? Yeah.

Sarah Hazelke

I've driven in neighborhoods where, like, you can feel, like, visually, you're seeing, like, a noisy argument happening, and it's sort of unpleasant. Yes. And it starts to feel like, is this. Is this something that we're doing? I don't know.

Like, it's a tradition, or is it, like, sports where people are, like, really into their team? Oh. So the question is, like, does this have an actual utility? Or is this about, like, people signaling what tribe they're in kind of. Totally, yeah.

Like, are we doing this? Because it's actually useful. Like, should I be putting signs in my yard? Is this actually a thing that's changing minds, or is this just something that people are doing? Because that's what they've always done, and it feels like you're doing something or you're just being obnoxious.

Sarah Hazelke

Right. And what's your suspicion? Cause I'm just. Nothing about my personality lends itself. Like, I don't even know where you get a political yard sign.

Like, I'm just like, it is. Nothing is more opposite my feelings about the world, but, like, I always assumed that they don't work because I've never driven by and been like, oh, like, Dave is for comptroller. I guess that's what I'm doing. Like, I feel like your suspicion is that they're not doing something. My suspicion is that they're not doing something, yes.

You said, I don't even know where you would get one. So my neighbor is one of the people that gives them out her porch. Like, she's one of the Chatham Democrats. She's very into this. She's very involved politically, and so she's like a location that people come to pick up signs for our local representatives.

And so I think it's maybe more on my mind because of that. You're saying right by the speaker of this. Yes. Yeah. I'm like, I'm near a distribution center for this thing that's happening, and I'm wondering, should I be putting signs on my yard?

Because if it did make a difference, like, it's a pretty low effort thing. I don't know. Okay, cool. Well, we'll find out what we can find out.

PJ Vogt

After these ads. A series of experiments, plus a mysterious fellow named Ben Griffin you may have heard of. That's after the break.

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Sarah Hazelke

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Welcome back to the show. Can you just tell me who you are and what you do professionally? My name is Cindy Cam. I am a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University.

Doctor Cindy Cam directs an experimental research lab at Vanderbilt. Her work focuses on political psychology and public opinion, which means she drives past the odd yard sign, the way a geologist might pick up an unusual conglomerate rock. Before doctor Kim started studying yard signs, she actually wondered about them in very much the same way our listener Sarah. Had.

As a typical american. You know, I saw yard signs pop up around election time. Yeah, pregnant with my son in 2010, and there was a very noisy election happening in my area between a candidate whose last name was Henry, and he had signs everywhere. Everyone knew that Henry was running for election. Yeah.

And there was sort of a no name challenger who was trying to unseat Henry. Well, Henry won. Now, he was an incumbent. He had tons of signs. Yeah.

A couple months later I gave birth to my son and his name was Henry. Did the yard signs name your son? I think it's one of these things where you start to see a name and it becomes more familiar to you, it is more pleasant, and you kind of start liking it. So I guess what I hear you saying is the theory of the yard sign is name recognition. Correct.

So the psychological process is called perceptual fluency. Perceptual fluency. You know, the first time you hear a song and you think, I don't know, that's kind of a weird song. But then you hear it again and you hear it again, and it becomes much easier for you to listen to it. Yeah.

Perceptual fluency means that the more you're exposed to something, the more familiar it becomes. And before you even know it, you like it. Talking to Doctor Cindy Cam, I noticed how essentially she's a student of the least rational parts of our minds, the parts we might call our gut instinct. But which are usually really our capacity. To bullshit ourselves to believe we know something we don't actually know at all.

PJ Vogt

I was curious how she figured out a method for studying this particular question. You can't run the same election twice. You're not going to convince some city councilor to not use yard signs so that you can learn a little bit more about the world. There will be a concrete answer to this yard signs question. But before that, I just want to appreciate the process of getting there.

How doctor Cam cheerfully, methodically devises ways to measure human irrationality. Well, that's one of the fun things about being a political scientist, is that we get to think creatively about ways to get at our questions in multiple ways. And some political scientists who have collaborated with campaigns and decided to randomly place yard signs in one district versus another, for example, or in one neighborhood versus another, and they're able to then estimate how effective that yard sign is. That is not the approach we took. My colleague Liz Zechmeister and I are political psychologists.

So given we wanted to study the psychological processes, we went to our laboratory.

PJ Vogt

Phase one in the lab. So the background for our study comes from the psychological tradition. There are these really interesting psychological studies that have shown, for example, that if research subjects are asked to read a random list of names on one day, then they come back the next day and they are asked to look at a bunch of different names on a list. They decide that the ones that seem kind of familiar to them must be famous. Interesting.

That's called the false fame effect. So we have the sense that, you know, being exposed to things. Right. Does affect subsequent decisions. The counter hypothesis or whatever, like the argument against this idea would be if I believed I was a totally rational, fully informed person, which I know that I don't meet either of those criteria, but if I were, the idea that a politician is well known would not.

PJ Vogt

Be a reason to vote for them. Because what my rational mind would tell me is they could be well known for anything. Most politicians, at least on a local. Level, are well known. It shouldn't matter.

Sarah Hazelke

But you're testing whether it does. Yes. So, in an idealized democracy, citizens are all knowing, devote as much time as they can to becoming fully informed. And when it comes time to vote, one, they turn out, and two, they cast fully informed votes that are consistent, say, with underlying value or policy preferences. So that's the utopia.

We did not live in an idealized democracy. So you're measuring what we have and what happens. So instead of imagining this paradise, we want to know in the real world what happens. But before we get to the real world, we want to know in the laboratory, can we capture a psychological process? The funny thing about our study is that we expose people to names, but we did it subliminally.

Sarah Hazelke

How do you do that? Our research subjects are seated in front of a computer. They are told you will see some words or letters flash in front of you. Ignore those. This is just part of the study.

So they are asked to just watch the screen for about 30 seconds. Inside that 30 seconds, they are randomly assigned to receive a nonsensical set of letters or a name. So our candidate's name is Ben Griffin. We selected this name because we wanted a name that would not be so unusual that people would notice it. We just selected sort of a name that seemed reasonably common.

Sarah Hazelke

Yeah. So in the experiment, our research subjects who are randomly assigned to receive the name, they're sitting there, they're looking at a screen, and Griffin is popping up, hidden amongst a bunch of other letter strings so that it is not visible to someone who is just looking at the screen. It's presented subliminally in microseconds. Yeah. Later we ask them.

We're political psychologists. We're interested in elections. So imagine there's a hypothetical election between two candidates. There's one candidate, Mike Williams, another sort of just kind of common name. And then there's another candidate.

His name is Ben Griffin. Would you be willing to vote for this candidate or the other candidate? Have you given them any other information about these hypothetical candidates? No. In this baseline experiment, we give them no information.

And so the fully rational person would say, I have no idea. I have no information. I'll flip a coin, you know, we're not dealing with these fully rational people. So we find a ten percentage point increase in willingness to vote for Ben Griffin. Ten percentage point, correct.

PJ Vogt

Interesting. And that would hold like that's a real effect. You get ten percentage points off of, I've heard this name before. That's correct. And people don't know that they've heard it before because it's subliminally exposed.

Sarah Hazelke

So they're not saying themselves, oh, this is the Ben Griffin who I like. They're just like, I just have a feeling and I can't explain it. That's correct, yes. So we have these feelings and a gut feeling, right. That, oh, this name is kind of familiar.

I don't know where I've heard it. Yeah, I guess I'd be willing to vote for this guy. So that's what we found in our first experiment, was that subliminally priming a set of our respondents with the last name Griffin increased their willingness to support Ben Griffin. And we did follow up questions asking people to distinguish between the two candidates on their traits, their experience and their viability. Have you given them any information about their trades?

I have given them no information about these candidates.

PJ Vogt

Doctor Kam and her colleagues asked voters follow up questions about Ben Griffin's trades versus the traits of his made up competitors. Did Ben Griffin seem more empathetic? Did Ben Griffin seem more experienced? Voters did not say Ben was more experienced or more empathetic. He just seemed for some reason like a more viable candidate.

Doctor Kam said there are limits, of course, to the benefits of name recognition. Comptroller Ted Bundy, for instance, is unlikely to sweep. And there are other effects that can overpower name recognition. For instance, doctor Cam's team ran other studies in which voters were given more information about these other fake candidates. In these studies, they were told that the candidate name they recognized was now running against an incumbent, a person whose name they didn't know, but who they were told was already in power.

In these studies, the name recognition advantage melted away. It felt like the team now understood the power and the limits of this name recognition effect of the strength of a yard sign, at least in a lab. Now they were ready to move on to the next phase, phase two out in the real world. So our first three studies are these very clean laboratory studies with undergraduates. And from an academic standpoint, they have high causal leverage.

We can really say that exposing people to these subliminal primes affects their vote choice. Or in the case of studies two and three does not affect their vote choice. Cause they are relying on the incumbent coup. Yeah, but the follow up question is, does it make a difference in the real world? Right.

PJ Vogt

So how do you test that? We came up with a design that exploits natural variation in the real world among parents who are dropping their kids off for school. So what do you mean? What does that look like? There is a local school where half of the parents are randomly assigned to enter the school using, say, street egg.

Sarah Hazelke

Mm hmm. And then the other half of the parents are told to use street beak. Oh, this is just so the school doesn't end up with, like, a huge clustered knot. Correct. Oh, but you can.

I see, their traffic managing strategy means you can put yard signs on one of these two approaches. That's right. So we took advantage of a school's decision to manage traffic using one path versus another path. How did you. Sorry, I know this is the most important question, but how did you find the school?

Was it just like, someone who was doing this study was like, by the way, I have to do this for my kids anyway. Yes. Very smart. So this is one of these things where it's helpful to be in the real world and be thinking about, oh, how do we actually do this in the real world? And what are the ways in which people are assigned to take particular paths in life?

Yeah. So we exploited this natural variation, and we placed three yard signs for Ben Griffin in front of a home that happened to be along one of the two routes. Yeah, those three signs stayed there for three days. Yeah. We took them off, and then we launched a survey.

And we included a key question on our survey, which asked the parents which route they took to school. And then we included our own questions, which were about an upcoming city council race. Got it. So, the upcoming city council race was a complicated one where I believe there were eight candidates on the ballot. We included two additional ones on the list in our survey.

We said, here are the candidates running for election in the city council. And then we hid our two names in that list.

Sarah Hazelke

And I'm assuming one was the name that you put on the yard side, and one is a totally made up name that's also. Well, they're both made up, but one wasn't yard signed. Correct. So Ben Griffin and Milt Jenkins were inserted in the list of city council candidates. Ben Griffin is the person or the name for whom we posted the signs.

Milt Jenkins is considered the placebo name. Yeah. Another fake name. So we asked the parents in the upcoming race for city council, who are your top three choices for city council. And what did they say?

It turns out that Ben Griffin received a ten percentage point increase among those who were assigned to take that travel route to school. So it's a very sturdy effect even in the real world. Correct. Ten percentage points.

PJ Vogt

Ten percentage points. Which means our listener Sarah from Chatham can walk next door to her signs, applying neighbor, pick up a plastic piece of junk, jam it in the soil of her yard, and assuming enough of her friends do the same thing, and assuming it's a relatively low information kind of election, they might reasonably hope to sway the outcome by ten percentage points. I'm sorry, that is a strange reality to be forced to consider after the break. How exactly should we feel about that doctor cam's interpretation? Not at all what I expected, but that's after Samantha search engine is brought to you by Netsuite okay, quick math.

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Welcome back to the show.

Sarah Hazelke

So I wanted to know the thing. I usually want to know when I learn things. If yard signs are powerful enough to have a ten percentage point effect. How am I supposed to feel about that? I know we don't live in a utopia, and I know that if it turns out Ben Griffin is not the world's best city counselor, like, the world doesn't end tomorrow.

But there's also a part of me that is slightly freaked out by this, I guess. How am I supposed to feel as a political scientist? I think it's fascinating. What about as a citizen in a democracy? So as a citizen in a democracy, I will say, one is we have idealized notions of what citizens ought to do.

And the second is, do we want to know the truth? Do we want to know empirically? That is, how do people actually make decisions? Yeah. In the absence of controlling other information, people do rely on name recognition.

I will say we do not study what makes people recognize some names over others. That's not something that we do, because in our studies, we experimentally manipulate recognition in the real world. Right. Some candidates have their names out there, right. For whatever reasons, that is, they're doing more to raise money, they're doing more to reach out to candidates, they're doing more to be out on the media.

Right. So it's possible that name recognition can be efficient, an efficient heuristic in the absence of all information, because those are candidates who are very invested in the race and who are doing their best to get their names out there. Yeah. I will also say, though, that there are, you know, ways that people can learn about candidates. And if they learn more information about candidates, then name recognition really doesn't matter.

Sarah Hazelke

And when you say there are ways that people can learn more, I assume you mean like, either they can read journalism, they can watch debates, and that in, say, a presidential election, there's so much information, whether the information's good, bad, accurate, not, people are theoretically making more informed decisions in elections that get more attention and coverage. Correct. My sense here is that name recognition matters on the margins in the absence of other sources of information. That also suggests people are not choosing randomly. So maybe that's a minimal comfort, that instead of going to the ballot booth and simply flipping coins, people are using their guts.

And some of these guts are maybe informed by real behaviors by the candidates and the media. Have you seen, I mean, your work has been published. Have you seen political campaigns? I don't want to use the word weaponize, but, like, have you seen people use the findings from your work in the real world in a way to either win or manipulate elections? No, I have not.

Sarah Hazelke

It just makes you realize, like, oh, if I found a fringy enough election and just really, really went hard with yard signs, it's not impossible to imagine winning or increasing my odds. Yes. So there is a little anecdote that I've heard of but have not verified. Yeah. Which is in a small northeastern town, a young man decided he was going to run.

I believe it was for something like city council. He was interested in politics, but as a sort of 20 something, had not really had much experience in politics. But his uncle was a sign maker, and it turns out he won the election. Obviously, the search engine team never wanted to miss an opportunity to over research something. Tried to fact check this fun, possibly apocryphal story.

PJ Vogt

We weren't able to confirm it. We did reach out to the politician Cindy had heard this rumor about. They did not get back to us. Perhaps it was true and they didn't want to talk about it. Perhaps it was untrue and they thought we were deranged.

Regardless, I had gone into this interview expecting honestly to learn that yard signs didn't really work or rarely worked. I still didn't know what to make of the fact that, according to doctor Cindy Cam's research, they have a measurable and consistent effect. How does your work make you feel personally, just about democracy? I'm pausing because that's a really interesting question. As empirical social scientists, we don't really think about how we feel about democracy.

We just want to explore how it works. Yeah, I would say it's a healthy step forward for the field, not to be hung up on idealized versions of what would happen in a utopia, but rather to think about how ordinary people make decisions in the context of their real lives. Right. So it's like. I mean, the way I feel about democracy is I really like it and I really worry about it.

Sarah Hazelke

And it sounds like one reason that you do the work you do is because your underlying belief is if we understand how this actually works, rather than how it would work in a perfect world, we can decide how we feel about that. We seem to have decided for now that actually there are elections where we're okay with the idea that some percentage of the decision of who ends up in power is just like yard signs and name recognition. But we could change that if we wanted to, but we couldn't change it unless we understood that that was what was going on. Yeah, I agree with that. I think that what's helpful is to know how do people make decisions?

And then what are maybe some interventions that could be made to improve the quality of their decision making. So one possibility is to think about these elections where people don't have a lot of information. And to think, one, is there a way that we can provide them with more information? Or two, should we reduce the burden on citizens and have some of these positions be appointed, say, by people who are elected when voters actually do pay attention? Oh, interesting.

Sarah Hazelke

So, like, you could have a world where rather than voting for the dog catcher. Yeah. Maybe the dog catcher does not have to be someone who is on a ballot. Right. One of the things about american electoral decisions is that, one, we are asked to do them a lot, and two, the ballots are extremely long.

Yeah. And this is unique and different from the context of the rest of the world. Now, on the one hand, more democracy seems like it's better. Right. Having more choices and more options.

Yes. Is more democratic. On the other hand, there is a burden of decision making of choice. Right. And sometimes people get overwhelmed with having too many choices.

Sarah Hazelke

It's interesting, you're describing a world where there's a paradox wherein if you have a superabundance of democratic choices, eventually the world becomes less democratic in the sense of you overwhelm people and they either don't choose or they choose somewhat randomly and the system becomes very imperfect. Yes. And this is a psychological phenomenon as well called the paradox of choice, where having too much choice can be dissatisfying to people, can make them averse to choosing. But on the other hand, having choice is so classically democratic. Yeah.

So it is a real conundrum. There's this concept of the low information voter, the person who is not obsessive. They're half paying attention. I know that people who do political science use that term descriptively. In the world of journalism, I sometimes hear journalists use that term pejoratively.

Sarah Hazelke

I feel like what surprises me about the way you talk about it is that I think often the implied solution is everyone just needs to be a better democratic citizen. You know, people, people should spend more time learning about their compatroller or whatever. And I feel like what I hear you saying in your work is like, sure, that's one way to do it, but the reality is it's not what is always or often happening. And perhaps we might consider fixing this by looking at the system we're presenting people rather than expecting human nature to suddenly change. Yes.

I think one of the ways that we can approach voter decision making is to try to rehabilitate the voter. Right or to try to create structures that work with who the voter is. I mean, so one of the ways to think about this also is we encourage people to turn out to vote, but we should also be encouraging them when they do turn out to vote to think about, you know, what are the races that I want to vote for? And it's okay to leave some blank if they don't have an opinion.

PJ Vogt

I found myself thinking about Cindy's observation in a not settled way for a while after this conversation. In America, democracy is both our system of government and an affirmative value, something all of us minus. I guess a few pro monarchy people on substack publicly agree is good. And I do too. So I've never asked, what's the right amount of democracy?

Or is there an amount of democracy at which things become less democratic, where the wisdom of the crowd becomes decreasingly wise? Yard sign democracy, a concept I expect I'll sit with for a while. Okay, last question. Why do you think? Cause the listener who wrote in, she was describing how in her family these yard signs were provoking rage.

Sarah Hazelke

I've sometimes felt that way. Why do you think that something can both make somebody feel like, I don't know if there's even a point to this and I'm mad about it. That's the nature of politics, isn't it?

That's a good answer. Thank you so much for talking to us about this. My pleasure.

PJ Vogt

Doctor Cindy Cam, professor, researcher and William R. Keenan, junior chair at Vanderbilt University search engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. We have a premium version of our show called Incognito Mode. If you've already subscribed, thank you so much. You are helping keep this thing running.

If you'd like to sign up or just learn about the many benefits of incognito mode, you can learn more at search Engine show this week. Our newest subscriber is Pablo from Stockholm. Thank you Pablo from Stockholm. I've never been to Stockholm. I am a huge fan of the syndrome though.

The show was created by me, PJ Vote and Shruthi Pinamanani and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Fact checking by Mary Mathis. Original composition and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss Berman and Leah Reese Dennis. Thanks to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Perello and Jon Schwarzenegger Schmidt and to the team at Odyssey, JD Crowley, Rob Mirandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Kate Hutcheson, Matt Casey, Maura Curran, Josefina Francis, Kurt Courtney and Hilary Schuff.

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