Psychologists have been writing increasingly penetrating stories about American politics, from explaining why President Donald Trump’s supporters remain loyal to him and how his rhetoric impresses them to the manner in which conservatives view smiling as a power play.
Now a new study explains how Congress manipulates people on all sides to support legislation — that is, by naming those laws after people whose stories can evoke sympathy. And the strategy seems to work.
In a research paper for journal Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, a study led by University of Texas at El Paso psychology researcher Krystia Reed found that “legislators often propose bills in honor of a victim following a tragic event involving public outrage (e.g., AMBER Alerts, Megan’s Law) and that by doing so convince people more effectively to support them. To ascertain these facts, they conducted three experiments.
“We conducted three experiments to empirically test whether eponymous legislation received greater public support than legislation without a victim’s name and story,” the authors wrote. “In Study 1 and Study 2, participants read a proposed bill that either included a victim’s name and narrative (eponymous condition) or not (control) and rated their approval of the bill, cognitive and affective responses, and reasoning. In both of these studies, participants were significantly more likely to support the eponymous bill than the control bill. Study 2 further suggested the effect was mediated by sympathy.”
They added, “In Study 3, we manipulated the victim’s name and narrative separately and found that narrative, not name, drove increased support. Narrative also increased sympathy in Study 3, but sympathy did not mediate the effect of narrative on bill support.”
Overall they expressed alarm that this indicates people can be easily manipulated into supporting certain bills simply by attaching sympathetic stories to them.
“Findings support legal commentators’ concerns about eponymous legislation,” they wrote. “Legislators need to be cautious when proposing such bills to ensure that they are not ineffective or harmful despite receiving increased public approval.”
To conduct their first experiment, the authors spoke with 112 university students about a bill that restricted solitary confinement in juvenile detention facilities. While everyone supported the bill when it was attached to a tragic story about a teenager named Rosemary, only three-fourths did so when they were merely introduced to the text. On the second occasion, “194 adults from a national online participant pool read a bill requiring drug and alcohol monitoring devices for people on parole,” according to reporting by PsyPost. “One group received only the plain text of the proposal. The experimental group read an addition explaining that the bill was inspired by a teenager killed in a collision caused by an intoxicated driver.”
PsyPost added, “The narrative version again garnered much higher approval ratings. Nearly 80 percent of the readers who saw the victim’s story supported the monitoring requirements. In the group without the story, support only reached about 60 percent.”
In the third experiment, 365 undergraduate students were presented with a bill. Some were given just the text of the legislation, others just the story attached to it and still others received both.
“The researchers found that the narrative itself is what primarily changes minds,” PsyPost explained. “Including a victim’s story boosted approval rates substantially compared to reading the bill without a story. Just adding the name to the top of the proposal led to minor increases in support on a graduated scale.”