Despite their eager anticipation, many viewers will focus on the wrong thing while watching the first Democratic presidential nominee debates on June 26 and June 27. The debates are often viewed as a tool for seeing the candidates “in action” to learn about their trustworthiness and authenticity. Yet viewers stand to learn more by focusing on the candidates’ policies during the debate rather than trying to play Sherlock Holmes about their personal qualities.
In fact, a better time to assess trustworthiness will be the morning after the debates have been completed.
If we hope that the debates will help us learn about the personalities of less familiar candidates, then we are likely to be tripped up by our first impressions. We tend to think the first thing we learn about someone is the most valid. Even when we are not aware of it, our tendency to lock onto initial impressions is written in our brain. Brain activity was recorded while people formed impressions of job candidates by watching snippets of the candidates answering questions about their personal qualities. People only needed to see a candidate for 2.5 seconds before the researchers were able detect brain activity that predicted whether or not they would fail to change their initial impression of a candidate once new information came to light.
There is another problem with the expectation that the debates will shed useful light on candidates' trustworthiness: we are simply not good at identifying lies.
Our ability to tell whether someone is lying is not much better than chance. In fact, we tend to mistake a lie for truth. And we tend to more heavily base our perceptions of how much we have seen someone's true, authentic self on the extent to which we think they are morally good rather than their competence. That is, we fool ourselves into believing that we know someone more completely when we learn about their ethics in comparison to when we learn about their ability to actually perform their job. Yet, truly learning about someone entails knowing their ethics and their competence (as well as their other personal qualities). Viewers face an uphill battle to accurately identify liars in the candidate pool and their focus on honesty may lead them to overestimate how well they know the person they want to elect as president.
So, what can viewers learn from a debate?
Candidates on stage do give useful information when they outline their policies for the issues facing our country. It can be tempting to dismiss or place little emphasis on campaign promises. After all, why pay attention to the details when it is widely believed that politicians are not likely to follow through? Despite our skepticism, most politicians make a good faith effort to keep about two-thirds of their campaign promises. Do you want to base your vote on promises that have a 66 percent chance of action or on a personality assessment whose accuracy is closer to blind chance?
Still not convinced that your time is better spent focusing on policy than personality? If the goal is to assess whether candidates are trustworthy, then your best bet is still to avoid focusing on whether you think each candidate is trustworthy while watching the debate. People are more likely to accurately assess whether someone is trustworthy when they distract themselves with other activities and let their gut feelings emerge.
Watch the debate, focus on policy, and then check your gut feeling on trustworthiness the next morning.