The Audience Decides
Hardin Young: Welcome to Short Talks from the Hill, a podcast from the University of Arkansas. I’m Hardin Young, a research and economic development writer here at the university. Today I’d like to welcome Patrick Stewart, a professor of political science. Stewart is a certified Facial Action Coding System coder, whose current research concentrates on the emotional responses of audiences listening to leaders and those aspiring to leadership. His research examines audience applause, laughter and booing in response to comments by candidates during presidential debates and how individuals respond to different types of facial displays and nonverbal behavior. Earlier this summer, he published a book on this topic, titled The Audience Decides: Applause-Cheering, Laughter and Booing During Debates in the Trump Era. Patrick Stewart, thanks for being here today.
Patrick Stewart: Thank you for having me.
HY: So can you give us an overview of The Audience Decides?
PS: Sure, and I appreciate being here. The Audience Decides is an attempt to understand one of the most important parts of our presidential campaign system: presidential debates. Our debates are the one time during the electoral cycle that we’re able to take a look at our candidates and get an unbiased look at who they are. They’re not stage managed, they aren’t pre-formed, they aren’t already edited into a specific sort of marketing brand. During the debates we get to see them and how they react to questions and to comments in real time. There’s no hiding from this, so watching them and watching how they respond and, importantly, how the audience responds with their laughter, their cheering, applause and booing, tells us so much more about them than what they would have us believe. So I think it’s a more reliable and honest approach to understanding presidential candidates. Now, the thing is, most of the research to date has been looking at the presidential general election debates. And you know what? We’ve already made our minds up by that time. We’ve already seen the candidates over the course of one to two years, and if we’ve got any partisan identity, that plays a huge role. And while I deal with that in the book, I think what is most important is getting a look at those candidates at the very beginning of the process. Those initial pre-primary debates when you have multiple candidates on stage and you’ve got a skeptical audience of partisans who just don’t necessarily know who they’re going to support at that time. So, I focus on them more than anything else.
HY: Yeah, sounds good. So why did you feel the need to write this book? Are presidential debates something that you’ve always valued or followed closely?
PS: Well, really, there’s two things that really drive me when I consider debates and when I consider political science generally. The first is that actions mean more– let me restate that…
HY: Sure.
PS: Actions mean more than words. Well, words tell us information about the candidates. People can lie. There’s cheap talk. Nonverbal behavior is something that you can’t fake as easily. So we pick up on that. So that’s what I focus on. The second thing that really drives me is that followers matter more than leaders. Without followers there are no leaders, and so these candidates on stage have to convince that audience that they are the individual who should lead them. And that means that they have to be able to respond to difficult questions, show knowledge and not be able to hide with aggressive insults and taunts, or by hiding away from any of the questions. They are naked up there on stage and they have to respond.
HY: I was going to ask you this last but I think I’m going to move it up just because it connects to your answer here, which is we noted in the introduction that you were Certified Facial Action Coding System coder. It’s a mouthful. It sounds complicated, but can you talk a little bit about what getting certified entails? What’s the process?
PS: Oh, the process is long and arduous. It takes around 100 hours. It took me longer than that to train in this, and it involves taking a course, which is looking at the facial muscular movement on a frame-by-frame basis. So we’re looking at — there’s 40 plus movements in the face. There’s movements of the head and you’re looking at these movements. You’re disambiguating them. So, you’re looking at them specifically, and then you put it all back together at the end. So you’re not making inferences about emotions, you’re essentially looking at how the face moves. And then afterwards you get an idea as far as what’s going on with that individual. And this allows for greater precision and allows for you to separate yourself emotionally from the person that you’re looking at. Now certainly that is a key thing in my research now. It’s not dealing with it as much with the book, although the starting point for me was laughter. Laughter is something that is the primal activity that makes humans sociable. Laughter brings people together. It’s positive and it’s reliable because when you laugh it involves a smile, a jaw drop, and it involves movement of the chest and involves something stereotypical that we can understand laughter. We know when people are laughing. And so that’s really the starting point for the book is looking at laughter and how it bonds people together, which this is essentially the beginning of politics: bringing people together.
HY: Although the debates have not been historically known for being funny.
PS: Well, I would actually disagree with you. We’ve had some really amusing candidates on stage. My previous book, Debatable Humor, is about the candidates who were the funniest individuals on stage during the primaries. And that was Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on the Democrat side. And on the Republican side, it was — on the Republican side, it was John McCain and Mike Huckabee. And these are individuals — Mike Huckabee, obviously, we know Mike Huckabee. He’s an Arkansas son and he is someone who is pragmatic, and he knows how to connect with people. No, people might say, hey, he didn’t win the presidential primary. He wasn’t the nominee. I say, look, he’s a winner. He became a national figure because of his incredible sense of humor. And while he’s moved out of state and certainly his daughter moved to DC, and is someone who became a very powerful player from the DC arena, I think he won because of his humor. Because of his ability to bring people together.
HY: Yeah, I was a little young for it, but I know that Reagan was obviously well known for his sense of humor.
PS: Oh yes, yes. Most definitely.
HY: Something that kind of reinforces your point. Just kind of getting back to the book, I know that the book kind of expresses some frustration with what’s happened during some of the debates. So my question is, what is your frustration with these debates or what’s going on right now? And then I’ll follow up with another one.
PS: Well, my frustration with the debates is that they’re overpacked, OK? There’s too many people on stage. That’s number one. When you’ve got multiple people on stage, 10 people plus, you have the tendency to rely upon shorthand heuristics. In other words, “have I seen this person before?” as opposed to doing an in-depth comparison of their different knowledge sets. People can hide on stage because there’s much less speaking time. People can interrupt and be impolite on stage and they can assert dominance, and that is a form of leadership. But it isn’t necessarily the form of leadership that we need. That’s one of the things that concerns me, but more importantly, and coming from someone who is very much an egalitarian, someone who believes in representative democracy at its finest, the audience matters. And the problem is we don’t know who’s in that audience. That audience shouldn’t be made up of hand-selected individuals. I would argue, if I were to change things, the first and easiest thing to do would be to be a little bit more transparent about who the audience is. If you want to take a step from that, well, these debates should happen across the country and they should pull from the primary voters during the off-year elections, not the general elections, but the hardcore primary voters who show up and it should be randomly selected from those individuals. And those individuals should be in the audience because those people reflect the party and the candidates should be responsible to them. So that’s what I would suggest. And I think it would be fairly easy to do that and it might be really cool to turn it into a couple-day reality show where you see the candidates interacting one-on-one with these representatives of the public. And then you see them on-stage afterwards. Because then we’ll see, do they have that charismatic connection that we want? Are they good people according to the representatives of the public, the voters themselves?
HY: OK, so that makes me think of a couple of questions. One, is there do you think an optimum number of candidates that should be involved in these debates? What would they cull it down to?
PS: Well, I think 10 is too many. And the other thing is first we have to realize that our debates are essentially built off of game shows. So if we want to do a game show with 10 people on stage, let’s make it Jeopardy. Let’s make sure that they actually know what government does. Let’s quiz them. But that’s not necessarily as entertaining, although it could be fun to see some of our. candidates not know what government does. It’s happened before, and candidates have basically lost respect of the voters at that point. But I think there are different ways of dealing with this. You could arguably bring them and have them one-to-one respond to each other with a question and have a random element. You can do a variety of different game show things. You could turn it into a reality show. I’m not necessarily the one who can tell what is feasible, but I can say that well, we love watching reality TV. And guess what? Politics is the ultimate reality TV that affects us all.
HY: OK. So you don’t have a number that you think it should be? Just to clarify.
PS: Well, I will be very clear that once we start getting to around 10, probably not good. I don’t make any argument for a specific number. They’re psychologists that make the argument that we have a working memory of 6 plus or minus 2, to keep in mind. So we might say that eight is the upper threshold, or maybe 6 or maybe 4. I think that the certainly the Democratic Party tried to deal with it a little bit better than the Republican Party did in 2016, and the Republican Party is doing a better job of saying first you have to have this amount, this number of donors, and you have to have this amount of awareness from the general public within the polling. And I think that will narrow it down a bit, but ultimately it’s something that there might be some experimentation that goes on, and after all, are we humans? I mean, ultimately as humans we’re about experimenting with things. We’re about trying new things. I think it’s time to try something new.
HY: Fair enough. OK. So the other question gets back to the audience composition. I don’t know much about the process about how they’re selected. Is the process somewhat opaque? Do you have any sense of how those audiences come together?
PS: With all the research I’ve done, I’ve not seen anything systematically telling us what goes on. What we can see is that recently, ex-President Trump came on stage on CNN and the audience was filled with individuals who just adored him. And this was on purpose. And so it’s something that we’ve seen over the years is that you only let supporters into your speeches. So you showed this great support for the candidate and that right there I think is a bit of a problem. Now the national commission for presidential debates does a really good job of with their second debate, which is the town hall meeting, making sure that there are undecided individuals coming to the debate and letting us know that they are randomly selected from the voting base that is undecided. But with these, with these debates that were with the money-making networks, we really don’t know what goes on. We can make inferences, but we really don’t know at this stage. Certainly, I don’t know and someone might be able to tell me, hey, we’re doing this already. I would love to be proven wrong.
HY: So we’ve got, you know, the primary debates coming up here in a couple of weeks. What do you think people should look out for in these debates?
PS: How many people are on stage? Who’s at the center of the stage? Because we’re humans, we tend to focus at the center stage because those are the most important people. I would also pay attention to the fact that we have internal biases towards people who are louder, who have deeper voices, who are more assertive and aggressive. Because that isn’t necessarily the best leader. So knowing that you have biases this way might help us look for those individuals who are the better candidates who do not look like a leader but actually act like the leader we need.
HY: Patrick Stewart, thanks for coming in today.
PS: Thank you for having me.
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