Scandal for School

March 8, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Two headlines about candidate Jim Doyle:

• Doyle Calls for City to “Get Tough on Illegal Immigration”
• Doyle Admits to Extra-Marital Affair with One Time Aide

Which story are you going to read first? And which one are you likely to remember?

If you do want to read them, they are here. But you should know first that Jim Doyle is a fictional candidate, created by Beth Miller for an experimental study. The control group read five news stories on Jim’s policy positions. For the experimentals, Miller ditched a homeland security story and switched in a story about the affair (the story omitted any mention of positions that might have been involved).


John Sides summarized the results over at The Monkey Cage.

Unsurprisingly, subjects who read about the affair were more likely to remember the story -- 47% did so, compared to 32% of those who read the fourth policy-related story.

Perhaps more surprisingly, subjects who read about the affair were, at the end of the experiment, better able to recall what issues the candidate talked about and what positions the candidate took on these issues.

I wasn’t surprised. And I don’t think that what really matters is the scandal. Instead, what’s important about the scandal story is that it humanizes Jim Doyle. It makes him a real person rather than a purveyor of policies. And for some reason, we assimilate ideas more easily when they come from people. (I wish Miller had included a third condition – with Story #4 as something humanizing but not scandalous.)

I wasn’t surprised because in teaching, it has long seemed to me that students were better able to understand a book or article once I could convince them that it was written by a real human being, a person. As I blogged two years ago, my students seem to think that all readings assigned in college are written by some anonymous consortium created for the sole purpose of making their lives difficult. In the students’ minds, the author of all these readings is They.

Here’s how I put it in that post (apologies for recycling my garbage here, but I do like this anecdote).

I was teaching criminology, using the textbook I myself had written. It was listed on the syllabus that way, and the book had my name on the cover. Several weeks into the semester, a student had a question about some point I was making in class or some data I was presenting. I don’t remember the topic or the issue. All I remember is that the student said, “But didn’t they say . . .” and she went on to offer some bit of information.

“They?” I asked, “What they?”

“In the book. Didn’t they say that . . . .” she started to repeat her question.

“They is me,” I said. “I wrote that book.”

She seemed genuinely stunned, and I sensed that many in the class shared her confusion. The book was a school textbook; therefore it must have been written by the same “They” that churned out all textbooks. Yet here was someone they knew, a very ordinary person they saw two or three days a week, claiming to have written the book, and the evidence on the cover seemed to support his claim.

Once students see that these readings are not handed down like sacred texts from a distant oracle, they can more easily engage themselves with the ideas. If I were teaching theory, I would try to knock the big guys off their pedestals – Weber, Marx, Durkheim, and the others. If it takes scandal to do it, fine. But I would use any stories that make them fallible human beings