Interesting. I wish the article contained links to the sources though, because there are a number of potential caveats it doesn't much describe.
Amy Becker of Loyola University Maryland in Baltimore veered away from satirical news in her study published this summer about “sarcastic content.” She showed university students a video from The Onion, another video by The Weather Channel, or a control video. Both non-control videos were humorous takes on climate change. But the Onion video had a clear point of view, illustrated by its wry title: “Climate Change Researcher Describes Challenge of Pulling Off Worldwide Global Warming Conspiracy.” In contrast, the Weather Channel video poked fun at people who both do and don’t believe in climate change.
Becker found that only the Onion video had an effect. It increased people’s certainty that climate change was happening while also increasing their perception of the magnitude of the problem. As with previous studies, the video only made a difference among people who didn’t already think climate change was an important issue. “It seems that one-sided sarcasm can activate less-interested individuals to engage with the climate change issue,” the authors wrote.
There are people who are opposed, believers, neutral-interested and neutral-uninterested. Using humorous articles to engage the previously uninterested group is pretty obviously a good idea. Less obviously :
Feldman and colleagues published research that found that people who watched more satirical news were more likely to follow news about science and technology, the environment, and global warming. The effect was strongest for people with the lowest levels of formal education.
Furthermore, people inclined to disagree with an idea may argue less if it’s presented satirically. “Because people are focused more on understanding the joke and processing the humour, they have fewer resources leftover to counter-argue any message that they might disagree with,” Feldman says. “That allows some persuasive messages to kind of seep in and penetrate whereas otherwise they might not.”
That's an interesting take on the whole cognitive ease thing (https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RhysTaylorRhysy/posts/JH9Bptq5fs1). It wouldn't fit my intuition here. It might be right, but I would think if you actually get people to start thinking about something, they will, well, start thinking about it. They won't run out of mental resources : on the contrary, they'll start using them to examine the issue. If Feldman did a study to investigate this, the article does a disservice by not quoting it - as it's written, it appears to be a mere hypothesis based on correlations without examination of the underlying causes. That people who are more interested in sci/tech also watch satire doesn't in any way imply that the satire is persuading them of anything.
And it's easy to see so many ways in which this could go wrong. Yes, engaging the unengaged is a good thing. But what effect does it have on those who are already interested ? I'd bet good money that it will strengthen the stance of those who are already have an opinion either way - they will use their now more active brains to rationalise their stance, not examine the issue for itself. For the interested neutrals it's harder to predict. I should think the studies quoted would have looked at this, but the article doesn't say what they found on that aspect. It does at least state some caveats :
Even when people do get the joke, satire can be very polarising, Feldman says. “It attracts an audience who is already pretty liberal in orientation, and it in many ways preaches to the choir.” This can help mobilise like-minded audiences, but “it can also be really alienating to the other side.” It’s also possible that joking about a subject could make it seem less serious, Feldman says.
https://undark.org/article/satire-science-communication/
I believe references to the research can be found here:
ReplyDeletecomminfo.rutgers.edu - Lauren Feldman
Thanks Joe Carter. I briefly scanned the abstracts of relevant-sounding papers. As far as I can tell, this research is indeed about correlations more than causations, mainly focused on the trends between people who watch satirical shows and their other habits. That's fine, but I don't think there's much examination (here) of what happens if someone opposed to a scientific finding watches satire criticising alternative interpretations : there are too many selection effects, e.g. people tend to choose to watch things they agree with. An experiment where people are made to watch satire they disagree with would be interesting, but I would bet heavily against it having a persuasive (stance-changing) effect in most cases. It seems to me that the techniques of reinforcing existing belief and actually altering belief are quite different (got a series of posts on that in the works).
ReplyDeleteI do wish the article had provided direct links though. I'm much more likely to read something in full if I know it will be directly relevant to the point I'm interested in.
Rhys Taylor I suppose the advantage of categories is the focus they bring to specific aspects (or data sets) within a system. The disadvantage is that it can artificially isolate contingent aspects of the rest of the system, and the abstract tokens we use to classify those isolated data sets do not necessarily have a property within themselves to clarify whether they are a self referential artifact, or an actual causal property of a system (They can be an appearance caused by the naming of the data point for instance, or a symptom of other causes.)
ReplyDeleteMany of us treat the artifacts produced by the categorical lens we apply to look at things as actual entities because they are convincing renderings that are indistinguishable from reality.
Further, an isolated data set within a larger system typically has no property within itself to clarify whether it is an emergent symptomatic aspect of a larger relational field, or a causal agent, or part of a causal chain.
This mushy ground of varied clarity that we gain by using abstract tokens as a net to identify behaviors within systems sometimes fools us to remember we collapsed a much larger wave into a particle. (So to speak) It strikes me as arbitrary to isolate a symptom of a much larger system without remembering and understanding the larger context on which that expression depends. This is the only way to tell symptom from cause as far as I know.
I could be missing something(s)
Where are you two going after G+ shuts down...? All y'all pull my thinking up in a way I don't run into often.
ReplyDeleteMichael J. Coffey I haven't decided yet (there's a pinned thread in my profile about it though). MeWe and disapora look like by far the most common choices so probably either of both of those, but I'll wait and see how the guinea pigs everyone else does first.
ReplyDeleteJoe Carter To go slightly meta... what you say makes perfect sense to me in isolation. I don't disagree with any of it. But honestly, I'm really struggling to work out what you're referring to in this context.
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor I was trying (poorly) to illustrate the difficulty of telling the difference between correlations more than causations. Our categories can fool us to see things that are not there, or blind us to things that are for instance.
ReplyDeleteApologies for the brain fart-esque way I communicated it.
Thanks Joe Carter ! That makes a lot more sense now :D
ReplyDeleteThanks Joe Carter ! That makes a lot more sense now :D
ReplyDelete