Do political yard signs actually do anything?

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1:20hello hello hi one sec my thing is messed up over here i'm just trying to fix it I don't know why. Oh, okay. Can you hear me? Yeah. Earlier this week, I was talking to a search engine listener named Sarah Hazelkey. I'm always asking people to send in questions for the show. The thing I should warn you as a listener, if you do this, I might call you with follow-ups. Where are we talking from? Where are you? I'm in my car outside of a library. I come here to use their Wi-Fi while my kid is at their little Montessori preschool program. Oh, that's really nice. Sarah lives in Chatham, New York. We were talking Monday when everybody's small talk had been orbiting the same topic.

2:05What are you doing for the eclipse today? I don't know, actually, because the eclipse is during nap time. My kid naps really late. So I don't, yeah, I don't know what we're going to do. I guess I can like look outside. And with a two and a half year old, an eclipse is not a reason to rouse a child. Absolutely not.

2:31Okay, so tell me, what is your question? Yeah, so my question is, what's going on with these yard signs? Like, do they work? And why are there so many of them? And when you say yard signs, you mean like vote for blah, blah, blah, like the political yard signs? Yeah, the political yard signs. Okay. This came up last year, which was just local elections, but we had a very contentious district attorney election. And it was just ridiculous, the number of signs. In her email to the show, Sarah had said that this question, it had come up a few times when talking to her friends and family. In particular, her mom was feeling upset about these signs.

3:12The word rage was used. And how did you feel seeing the yard signs? Did you feel any way about them? I feel like it's a lot of visual clutter. Like, I'm a visual artist, and so I pay attention to what I'm seeing out in the world. And it just seemed like there were a lot. There would be four signs for one of the candidates. And then a little bit later, like, there would be four for the other candidate, too. And now it's like, is it canceling them out? What's happening here? Yeah, I've driven in neighborhoods where like you can feel like visually you're seeing like a noisy argument happening and it's sort of unpleasant.

3:51Yes. And it starts to feel like, is this something that we're doing? I don't know, like it's a tradition? Or is it like sports where people are like really into their team? Oh, so the question is like, does this have an actual utility or is this about like people signaling what tribe they're in kind of? Totally. Yeah. Like, are we doing this because it's actually useful? Like, should I be putting signs in my yard? Is this actually a thing that's changing minds? Or is this just something that people are doing because that's what they've always done? And it feels like you're doing something or you're just being obnoxious?

4:31Right. And what's your suspicion? Because I'm just, nothing about my personality lends itself. Like, I don't even know where you get a political yard sign. Like, I'm just like, it is, nothing is more opposite my feelings about the world. But like, I always assumed that they don't work because I've never driven by and been like, oh, like, Dave is for comptroller. I guess that's what I'm doing. Like, I feel like your suspicion is that they're not doing something. My suspicion is that they're not doing something. Yes. You said, I don't even know where you would get one. So my neighbor is one of the people that gives them out.

5:07She, her porch, like she's one of the Chatham Democrats. She's like very into this. She's very involved politically. And so she's like a location that people come to pick up signs for our local representatives. And so I think it's maybe more on my mind because of that. You're staying right by the speaker of this. Yes. Yeah. I'm like, I'm near a distribution center for this, this thing that's happening. And I'm wondering, should I be putting signs on my yard? Because if it did make a difference, like it's a pretty low effort thing. I don't know. Okay, cool. Well, we'll find out what we can find out.

5:51After these ads, a series of experiments, plus a mysterious fellow named Ben Griffin you may have heard of. That's after the break.

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8:33Welcome back to the show. Can you just tell me who you are and what you do professionally? My name is Cindy Kam. I am a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University. Dr. Cindy Kam directs an experimental research lab at Vanderbilt. Her work focuses on political psychology and public opinion, which means she drives past the odd yard sign the way a geologist might pick up an unusual conglomerate rock. Before Dr. Kim started studying yard signs, she actually wondered about them in very much the same way our listener Sarah had. As a typical American, you know, I saw yard signs pop up around election time.

9:16Yeah. I was pregnant with my son in 2010. And there was a very noisy election happening in my area between a candidate whose last name was Henry, and he had signs everywhere. Everyone knew that Henry was running for election. Yeah. And there was sort of a no-name challenger who was trying to unseat Henry. Well, Henry won. Now, he was an incumbent. He had tons of signs. Yeah. A couple months later, I gave birth to my son, and his name was Henry. Did the yard signs name your son? I think it's one of these things where you start to see a name and it becomes more familiar to you. It is more pleasant and you kind of start liking it.

10:09So I guess like what I hear you saying is the theory of the yard sign is name recognition. Correct. So the psychological process is called perceptual fluency. Perceptual fluency. You know the first time you hear a song and you think, I don't know, that's kind of a weird song. But then you hear it again and you hear it again, and it becomes much easier for you to listen to it. Perceptual fluency means that the more you're exposed to something, the more familiar it becomes. And before you even know it, you like it. Talking to Dr. Cindy Kam, I noticed how essentially she's a student of the least rational parts of our minds.

10:51the parts we might call our gut instinct, but which are usually really our capacity to bullshit ourselves, to believe we know something we don't actually know at all. I was curious how she figured out a method for studying this particular question. You can't run the same election twice. You're not going to convince some city councilor to not use yard signs so that you can learn a little bit more about the world. There will be a concrete answer to this yard signs question, But before that, I just want to appreciate the process of getting there. How Dr. Kam, cheerfully, methodically, devises ways to measure human irrationality.

11:28Well, that's one of the fun things about being a political scientist, is that we get to think creatively about ways to get at our questions in multiple ways. So there have been some political scientists who have collaborated with campaigns and decided to randomly place yard signs in one district versus another, for example, or in one neighborhood versus another. And they are able to then estimate how effective that yard sign is. That is not the approach we took. Now, my colleague Liz Zeckmeister and I are political psychologists. So given we wanted to study the psychological processes, we went to our laboratory.

12:15Phase one, in the lab. So the background for our study comes from the psychological tradition. There are these really interesting psychological studies that have shown, for example, that if research subjects are asked to read a random list of names on one day, then they come back the next day and they are asked to look at a bunch of different names on a list. They decide that the ones that seem kind of familiar to them must be famous. Interesting. That's called the false fame effect. So we have the sense that, you know, being exposed to things, right, does affect subsequent decisions. Okay. The counter hypothesis or whatever, like the argument against this idea would be if I believed I was a totally rational, fully informed person, which I know that I don't mean either of those criteria, but if I were, the idea that a politician is well-known would not be a reason to vote for them.

13:17Because what my rational mind would tell me is they could be well-known for anything. Most politicians, at least on a local level, are well-known. Like, it shouldn't matter. But you're testing whether it does. Yeah, so in an idealized democracy, citizens are all-knowing, devote as much time as they can to becoming fully informed. And when it comes time to vote, one, they turn out, and two, they cast fully informed votes that are consistent, say, with underlying value or policy preferences. So that's the utopia. We did not live in an idealized democracy. So you're measuring what we have and what happens.

14:01So instead of imagining, you know, this paradise, we want to know in the real world what happens. But before we get to the real world, we want to know, in the laboratory, can we capture a psychological process? The funny thing about our study is that we expose people to names, but we did it subliminally. How do you do that? Our research subjects are seated in front of a computer. They are told, you will see some words or letters flash in front of you. Ignore those. This is just part of the study. So they are asked to just watch the screen for about 30 seconds. Inside that 30 seconds, they are randomly assigned to receive a nonsensical set of letters or a name.

14:53So our candidate's name is Ben Griffin. We selected this name because we wanted a name that would not be so unusual that people would notice it. We just selected sort of a name that seemed reasonably common. Yeah. So in the experiment, our research subjects who are randomly assigned to receive the name, They're sitting there, they're looking at a screen, and Griffin is popping up, hidden amongst a bunch of other letter strings, so that it is not visible to, you know, someone who is just looking at the screen. It's presented subliminally in microseconds. Yeah. Later, we ask them, you know, we're political psychologists.

15:31We're interested in elections. So, imagine there's a hypothetical election between two candidates. There's one candidate, Mike Williams, another sort of just kind of common name. Yeah. And then there's another candidate. His name is Ben Griffin. Would you be willing to vote for this candidate or the other candidate? Have you given them any other information about these hypothetical candidates? No. In this baseline experiment, we give them no information. And so the fully rational person would say, I have no idea. I have no information. I'll flip a coin. You know, we're not dealing with these fully rational people.

16:06So we find a 10 percentage point increase in willingness to vote for Ben Griffin. 10 percentage point? Correct. Interesting. And that would hold? Like, that's a real effect. You get 10 percentage points off of, I've heard this name before. That's correct. And people don't know that they've heard it before because it's subliminally exposed. So they're not saying themselves, oh, this is the Ben Griffin who I like. They're just like, I just have a feeling and I can't explain it. That's correct. Yes. So we have these feelings and a gut feeling, right? That, oh, this name is kind of familiar. I don't know where I've heard it.

16:44Yeah, I guess I'd be willing to vote for this guy. So that's what we found in our first experiment was that subliminally priming a set of our respondents with the last name Griffin increased their willingness to support Ben Griffin. And we did follow-up questions asking people to distinguish between the two candidates on their traits, their experience, and their viability. Have you given them any information about their traits? I have given them no information about these candidates.

17:22Dr. Kam and her colleagues asked voters follow-up questions about Ben Griffin's traits versus the traits of his made-up competitors. Did Ben Griffin seem more empathetic? Did Ben Griffin seem more experienced? Voters did not say Ben was more experienced or more empathetic. He just seemed, for some reason, like a more viable candidate. Dr. Cam said there are limits, of course, to the benefits of name recognition. Comptroller Ted Bundy, for instance, is unlikely to sweep. And there are other effects that can overpower name recognition. For instance, Dr. Cam's team ran other studies in which voters were given more information about these other fake candidates.

18:03In these studies, they were told that the candidate name they recognized was now running against an incumbent, a person whose name they didn't know, but who they were told was already in power. In these studies, the name recognition advantage melted away. It felt like the team now understood the power and the limits of this name recognition effect, of the strength of a yard sign, at least in a lab. Now they were ready to move on to the next phase.

18:35Phase two, out in the real world. So our first three studies are these very clean laboratory studies with undergraduates. And from an academic standpoint, they have high causal leverage. We can really say that exposing people to these subliminal primes affects their vote choice. Or in the case of studies two and three, does not affect their vote choice because they are relying on the incumbent queue. Yeah. But the follow-up question is, does it make a difference in the real world? Right. So how do you test that? We came up with a design that exploits natural variation in the real world among parents who are dropping their kids off for school.

19:25So what do you mean? What does that look like? there is a local school where half of the parents are randomly assigned to enter the school using, say, Street A. And then the other half of the parents are told to use Street B. Oh, this is just so the school doesn't end up with like a huge clustered knot. Correct. Oh, but you can, I see, their traffic managing strategy means you can put yard signs on one of these two approaches. That's right. So we took advantage of a school's decision to manage traffic using one path versus another path. How did you, sorry, I know this is the most important question, but how did you find the school?

20:08Was it just like someone who was doing this study was like, by the way, I have to do this for my kids anyway? Yes. Very smart. So this is one of these things where it's helpful to be in the real world and be thinking about, oh, how do we actually do this in the real world? And what are the ways in which people are assigned to take particular paths in life? Yeah. So we exploited this natural variation and we placed three yard signs for Ben Griffin in front of a home that happened to be along one of the two routes. Yeah. Those three signs stayed there for three days. Yeah. We took them off and then we launched a survey and we included a key question on our survey, which asked the parents which route they took to school.

20:58And then we included our own questions, which were about an upcoming city council race. Got it. So the upcoming city council race was a complicated one where I believe there were eight candidates on the ballot. We included two additional ones on the list in our survey. We said, here are the candidates running for election in the city council. And then we hid our two names in that list.

21:34And I'm assuming one was the name that you put on the yard sign, and one is a totally made-up name that's also— well, they're both made up, but one wasn't yard signed. Correct. So Ben Griffin and Milt Jenkins were inserted in the list of city council candidates. Ben Griffin is the person or the name for whom we posted the signs. Milt Jenkins is considered the placebo name. Yeah. Another fake name. So we asked the parents in the upcoming race for city council, who are your top three choices for city council? And what did they say? It turns out that Ben Griffin received a 10 percentage point increase among those who were assigned to take that travel route to school.

22:27So it's a very sturdy effect, even in the real world. Correct. 10 percentage points.

22:3610 percentage points, which means our listener, Sarah from Chatham, can walk next door to her sign-supplying neighbor, pick up a plastic piece of junk, jam it in the soil of her yard, and, assuming enough of her friends do the same thing, and assuming it's a relatively low-information kind of election, they might reasonably hope to sway the outcome by 10 percentage points. I'm sorry, that is a strange reality to be forced to consider. After the break, how exactly should we feel about that? Dr. Cam's interpretation, not at all what I expected. But that's after some minutes.

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24:40Welcome back to the show. So I wanted to know the thing I usually want to know when I learn things. If yard signs are powerful enough to have a 10 percentage point effect, how am I supposed to feel about that? I know we don't live in a utopia, and I know that if it turns out Ben Griffin is not the world's best city councilor, like, the world doesn't end tomorrow. But there's also a part of me that is slightly freaked out by this, I guess. Like, how am I supposed to feel? As a political scientist, I think it's fascinating. What about as a citizen in a democracy? So as a citizen in a democracy, I will say, one is we have idealized notions of what citizens ought to do.

25:29And the second is, do we want to know the truth? Do we want to know empirically, that is, how do people actually make decisions? In the absence of controlling other information, people do rely on name recognition.

25:47I will say we do not study what makes people recognize some names over others. That's not something that we do because in our studies, we experimentally manipulate recognition.

26:03In the real world, some candidates have their names out there for whatever reasons. That is, they're doing more to raise money. They're doing more to reach out to candidates. They're doing more to be out on the media, right? So it's possible that name recognition can be efficient and efficient heuristic in the absence of all information because those are candidates who are very invested in the race and who are doing their best to get their names out there. Yeah. I will also say, though, that there are, you know, ways that people can learn about candidates. And if they learn more information about candidates, then name recognition really doesn't matter.