What Makes Someone or Something Persuasive? -- ---Malcolm Gladwell

During the 1984 presidential campaign between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale  for eight days prior to the election, a group of psychologists led by Brian Mullen of Syracuse University videotaped the three national nightly news programs which at the time were anchored by Peter Jennings at ABC, Tom Brokaw at NBC and Dan rather at CBS. Mullen examined the tapes and excerpted all references to the candidates, until he had 37 separate segments, each roughly two and a half seconds long. Those segments were then shown, with the sound turned off, to a group of randomly chosen people, who were asked to rate the facial expressions of each newscaster in each segment. The subjects had no idea what kind of experiment they were involved with, or what the newscasters were talking about. They were simply asked to score the emotional content of the expressions of these three men on a 21-point scale, with the lowest being "extremely negative" and the highest point on the scale "extremely positive."

The results were fascinating. Dan Rather scored 10.46---which translates to an almost perfectly neutral expression---when he talked about Mondale and 10.37 when he talked about Reagan. He looked the same when he talked about the Republican as he did when he talked about the Democrat.  The same was true for Brokaw, who scored 11.21 for Mondale and 11.50 for Reagan. But Peter Jennings of ABC was much different. For Mondale he scored 13.38. But when he talked about Reagan, his face lit up so much he scored 17.44. Mullen and his colleagues tried to come up with an innocent explanation. Could it be Jennings is just more expressive in general than his colleagues? The answer seemed to be no.

Now here is where the study gets interesting. Mullen and his colleagues then called up people in a number of cities around the country who regularly watch the evening network news and asked them who they voted for. In every case, those who watched ABC voted for Reagan in far greater numbers than those who watched CBS or NBC. In Cleveland, 75 percent of ABC watchers voted Republican versus 61.9 percent of CBS or NBC viewers. In Williamstown, Massachusetts, ABC viewers were 71.4 percent for Reagan versus 50 percent for the other two networks; in Erie, Pennsylvania, the difference was 73.7 percent to 50 percent. The subtle pro Reagan bias in Jennings's face seems to have influenced the voting behavior of ABC viewers.

Thinking the results may have been simply a fluke, four years later, in the Michael Dukakis---George Bush campaign, Mullen repeated his experiment, with the exact same results. "Jennings showed more smiles when referring to the Republican candidate than the Democrat," Mullen said, "and again in a phone survey, viewers who watch ABC were more likely to have voted for Bush."