Political candidates: More differentiation between positive than negative options; after exceeding a certain, relatively small level of negativity, people do not see any further increase in negativity

Is good more alike than bad? Positive-negative asymmetry in the differentiation between options. A study on the evaluation of fictitious political profiles. Magdalena Jablonska, Andrzej Falkowski and Robert Mackiewicz. Front. Psychol., July 28 2022. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.923027

Abstract: Our research focuses on the perception of difference in the evaluations of positive and negative options. The literature provides evidence for two opposite effects: on the one hand, negative objects are said to be more differentiated (e.g., density hypothesis), on the other, people are shown to see greater differences between positive options (e.g., liking-breeds-differentiation principle). In our study, we investigated the perception of difference between fictitious political candidates, hypothesizing greater differences among the evaluations of favorable candidates. Additionally, we analyzed how positive and negative information affect candidate evaluation, predicting further asymmetries. In three experiments, participants evaluated various candidate profiles presented in a numeric and narrative manner. The evaluation tasks were designed as individual or joint assessments. In all three studies, we found more differentiation between positive than negative options. Our research suggests that after exceeding a certain, relatively small level of negativity, people do not see any further increase in negativity. The increase in positivity, on the other hand, is more gradual, with greater differentiation among positive options. Our findings are discussed in light of cognitive-experiential self-theory and density hypothesis.

General discussion

In our research we analyzed the perceived differences among the sets of favorable and unfavorable options. More specifically, the aim of our studies was to investigate how people see the difference between good and bad political candidates. Certainly, they would vote for the good ones and not vote for the bad, but how do they compare the good candidate to a better one; and the bad to a worse? We looked for the answers to these questions in three experiments. In Study 1, participants compared the similarity of fictitious candidates to the best possible candidate or the worst possible one. We did not provide descriptions of the best and the worst possible and instead asked the participants to imagine such political figures. On the basis of some preliminary research, we chose some positive and some negative features and used them to prepare descriptions of five different candidates: the very bad, the bad, neutral, the good and the very good one. We presented their descriptions in a form of scales with negative and positive anchors. We used the same five descriptions and the same form of presentation in Study 2. This time, however, the participants not only assessed candidates’ similarities to the best and to the worst possible politicians but also estimated the probability of voting and likeability of the candidates as well as were asked to compare two profiles and decide how similar they were. We slightly changed the design in Study 3 in which we used narrative descriptions of the candidates. We conducted our research in the political setting, because candidate evaluation and selection is a process that many people at least occasionally undertake and which has important social, political and economic implications.

Our focus was on the differences between the evaluations of positive and negative candidates. The literature on differentiation provides evidence for two contradictory effects. On the one hand, negative information has been found to have more complex conceptual representations and lead to a wider response repertoire (Rozin and Royzman, 2001). Linguistic research and studies using spatial arrangement methods have also shown negative categories to be more diverse, with more words used to describe negative events and states (Rozin et al., 2010). Likewise, the proponents of density hypothesis (Unkelbach et al., 2008a) found that positive entities are more related (and thus denser) compared to their negative counterparts. On the other hand, literature provides convincing evidence for an opposite effect, that is a better differentiation between positive entities. For instance, Denrell (2005) found that people have more knowledge and more differentiated representations of liked than disliked social stimuli. In a similar vein, Smallman and others (Smallman et al., 2014; Smallman and Becker, 2017) have shown that people make finer evaluative distinctions when rating appealing than unappealing options.

Following this line of research, we assume better differentiation between positive and not negative options to be a norm, especially when making evaluations of social objects or deciding which option to select. Thus, in our research we predicted that participants would be more likely to see the difference between favorable than unfavorable candidates. In our settings that should result in different evaluations of the good and the best candidates, while the evaluations of the bad and the worst one should not differ (Hypothesis 1). We also predicted that additional information about the candidates would be more likely to change a candidate’s image if the valence of the extra information is opposite to the current image. That is, if a candidate is already favorable, the new positive information might help him or her only to some degree, while negative information would significantly harm his or her image. On the contrary, when a candidate is presented in a negative manner, a new piece of negative information would not hurt him or her much, whereas an additional piece of positive information might be quite beneficial for the candidate’s image (Hypothesis 2). Finally, drawing on two earlier hypotheses—on the better differentiation of positive options and an asymmetrical effect of additional positive and negative features—we formulated a hypothesis that joined together these two predictions, assuming that additional positive information would improve the evaluation of an already good candidate, whereas additional negative information would not harm a bad candidate profile (Hypothesis 3).

The results supported our hypotheses. In Study 1 and Study 2 we found that there were no differences in the evaluations of negative candidates, such as a candidate with overall score –24 and a candidate with overall score –48 (the numbers refer to the balance of the evaluations on six different dimensions) were perceived as equally bad. Still, the participants perceived candidates with overall scores + 24 and + 48 as significantly different. The effect was replicated in Study 3, in which candidates were described in a narrative form. This result supports our Hypothesis 1. Importantly, whereas the results of Study 1 and 3 provided only an indirect test of the hypothesized effect, Study 2 gave a direct test as the participants saw both profiles together and were asked to assess their perceived similarity.

Our second research interest was to test how additional positive and negative pieces of information change candidate perception depending candidate valence. As expected, positive features increased candidate evaluation, whereas negative ones decreased it but these effects were not symmetrical, undermining the normative predictions of for instance the contrast model of similarity. This confirms our Hypothesis 2. Furthermore, we obtained a mixed support for Hypothesis 3. The results of Study 1 and Study 2 showed that whereas adding negative features to a candidate’s profile would not change his or her evaluation when this profile was already negative, additional positive features strengthened the image of a unfavorable candidate. However, we did not observe any effect of additional positive features in the evaluations of candidates whose images were presented in a narrative form in Study 3. One possible explanation is that two additional positive characteristics carried less information (i.e., were less diagnostic) than their negative counterparts.

Overall, our findings suggest that people do not see much of a difference between political candidates with many negative features, regardless of the extent to which they are presented as bad. As it seems, at least in the political domain, if an overall evaluation goes below some standard, people do not differentiate between bad options. The effect may be attributed to different motivations in the processing of positive and negative options. If all available alternatives are unappealing, it does not really matter which one of them is worse. After all, they all seem equally bad and, indeed, why anyone would support a bad candidate? This was the case for assessing the similarity to an ideal or bad politician (Study 1, 2, and 3) as well as liking and voting intention (Study 2 and 3). Thus, regardless of their initial expectations people would not vote for a politician if his or her features fall below a certain standard. One possibility that explains this effect is that they would not be able to justify their decision (Shafir et al., 1993).

Importantly, even the standards of “good” and “bad” are not symmetrical, so that it is relatively easy to be deemed as inadequate for the post but rather difficult to be perceived as a good candidate. The effect was especially visible in Study 1 and 2, where there was a dramatic drop in the evaluation of unfavorable candidates, with extremely low, bottom values for candidates’ similarity to an ideal politician and very high similarity to a bad politician. This extremity effect can partially account for the lack of differentiation between negative options. Still, no differences between unfavorable candidate profiles, as predicted in Hypothesis 1, were also found in Study 3, where candidates were presented in a narrative manner and where evaluations were less extreme. Overall, the results of three studies follow our Hypothesis 1, in which we predicted that the evaluations of negative candidates should not differ significantly. However, if the judgment pertains to attractive options, then the decision which one of them is better gains on importance. As visible in our studies, there were significant differences between favorable candidates. Importantly, no ceiling effect was observed. Thus, the bottom effects observed for negative candidate profiles were not paralleled by the symmetrical ceiling effect for positive candidates, suggesting that the participants differentiated their answers when they thought such differentiations were appropriate, providing evidence for better differentiation between positive options.

The results may be explained with regard to two independent information processing systems proposed by Epstein in his cognitive-experiential self-theory (Epstein, 1990; Kirkpatrick and Epstein, 1992). The evolutionally older experiential system operates in an automatic and holistic manner, whereas the rational system is “a deliberative, verbally mediated, primarily conscious analytical system that functions by a person’s understanding of conventionally established rules of logic and evidence” (Denes-Raj and Epstein, 1994, p. 819). It seems that whereas an intense dislike toward negative options is an outcome of the experiential system, a better and more discriminative analysis of positive options is governed by the rational system. The finding can be also interpreted with the distinction into sufficient and necessary conditions, where a necessary condition is one which must be present in order for the event to occur but it does not guarantee the event, while a sufficient condition is a condition that will produce the event. Thus, it seems that the list of necessary conditions to be deemed as inadequate for the post is much shorter than the one for an ideal politician. Consequently, the standards for what it means to be good and bad are not symmetrical.

Our findings have important implications for density hypothesis (Unkelbach et al., 2008a; Alves et al., 2016), according to which the distribution range of positivity is much narrower than the range of negativity. It seems reasonable to assume that an optimal spectrum is narrower than the negative one and, as shown in many empirical studies on density hypothesis, that the inner structure of positive information is denser than the structure of negative entities. Still, in our opinion it does not imply a better differentiation between negative options. As our studies suggest, the structure of positive categories may be denser but this density is accompanied by (or maybe is a reason for) a better discrimination between favorable options. After all, after rejecting all negative alternatives, people put in much effort to decide which of the remaining options is the best or at least acceptable—although the extent of this effort is moderated by decision importance and individual differences (e.g., a distinction into maximisers and satisficers Schwartz et al., 2002). Thus, if the structure of positive entities is denser, it is likely that people use finer combs to disentangle it.

We are aware of some important drawbacks of our study. First, we did not investigate how people estimate real candidates and, consequently, we did not take into account the importance of political views or associations that some voters may feel for different political parties. This research direction should be taken by other scholars. For instance, it is interesting to analyze how well people differentiate between candidates that are from their party compared to the members of the opposing party. Furthermore, the way we constructed our candidate profiles may pose certain limitations on the ecological validity of the study. Although, the use of such profiles was justified by our intention to have a maximal control over analyzed stimuli, further studies should investigate more complex stimuli. Also, it is interesting to analyze how well people differentiate between options, depending on the modality in which they were presented. For instance, in our studies we found that numerical candidate profiles were evaluated more extremely than candidates presented descriptively. Thus, presentation modality as well as the range of a positive and negative spectrum are further areas of research. Overall, our research provides valuable insight into positive-negative asymmetry with regard to a less-explored area of a differentiation between positive and negative options in the political setting. Contrary to the findings on the better differentiation between negative options, we find evidence for the opposite effect, showing that the evaluations of a few favorable objects are actually more nuanced.