DeKALB | Brad Sagarin’s experience with corporate and government persuasion tactics have led him to develop methods of resisting misleading messages.

Sagarin, associate professor of psychology, originally received his B.A. in computer science but was turned on to psychology after several years of working for a corporation in Silicon Valley. It was during that time he began to wonder about some of the companies’ training methods.

“Some of the lessons were more beneficial to the company than the employees,” Sagarin said. “What I found was that it filled me with a lot of misunderstandings and poor ideas regarding the company and my place as an employee and what I could do to resist.”

It was also then he began observing the California elections, which included a plethora of ads with very little information, but a lot of emotional draw.

“All this made me wonder about the ethics of persuasion and how we could develop methods of instilling resistance against unethical persuasive tactics,” Sagarin said.

These tactics, he said, can be very useful in evaluating the ever-growing number of political smear ads now airing.

“Part of the challenge [of resisting] is that we are often unaware of the psychological process going on in our heads. When we view an ad we are not fully aware of its effect on us,” Sagarin said. “We may look at an ad and think that it’s silly, but it might still be leaving its mark.”

A good example of this, he said, is the person who isn’t politically knowledgeable at the voting booth. That person is making a decision about the candidates, even if it’s just having a “bad feeling” about one contender over another. It’s reasonable to say that some ads play into that feeling.

While all of us have seen a smear at one point or another, politicians have other questionable tactics up their sleeves which Sagarin’s research examines.

Push-polling is often a slippery slope for ethics. This was the alleged case in the 2000 presidential elections during which a South Carolina poll allegedly asked the following: “Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?”

“[The allegation] is completely fake, but it’s very effective in planting into people’s minds the rumor of it,” Sagarin said. “The campaign never lied, but by just asking the question, the question implies that it is true.”

With all sorts of political drama being hurled from both sides of the campaign this election, Sagarin said it’s important to remember that finding out the truth isn’t all that hard.

“If you are wiling to do a little research, you can find the answers. But even if you don’t have the time to do that, asking those questions and trying to think about the ad in a more critical, skeptical fashion can help us resist,” he said.