The rhyme as reason effect (aka the Keats effect)

There are other techniques that can have a subtle effect on persuasion. In a study in 2000, rejoicing in the title of ‘Birds of a Feather Flock Conjointly’, on the effect of aphorisms on people's perception of their accuracy, McGlone and Tofighbakhsh (2000) found that unfamiliar rhyming aphorisms such as, ‘What sobriety conceals, alcohol reveals' were judged to be more accuratethan versions that did not rhyme such as, 'What sobriety conceals, alcohol unmasks'. This is an example of the rhyme as reason effect where the use of poetic devices makes people feel that the statement is somehow true or accurate, hence the alternative name of the Keats effect. So, an assertion such as ‘Beauty is Truth and Truth Beauty, - That is all/Ye know on earth and all ye need to know’ sounds so ... true. Until you start to examine it and decide that there are probably other things ye need to know.

Poetic phrases, therefore, work subliminally, or peripherally. The UK Conservative Party seem to be better versed (to maintain the metaphor) than other UK parties and know the value of alliteration and repetition. Thus, in the run-up to the 2017 general election, we heard that the Conservatives represented ‘strong and stable' government unlike the ‘coalition of chaos" that other parties represented. There is, of course, a danger that aphorisms can be repeated too much, so some news media eventually start reporting the number of times a cliché is mentioned in a speech so they begin to lose their impact: ‘Brexit means Brexit' - That is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.

Choosing competent politicians the easy way

Our senses are continually being bombarded by information from all around us and most of the time, we are very good at filtering it to extract the useful bits. To do this, we can rely on salient superficial features in the natural world, usually unconsciously. For example, if a fruit is red, then it's probably ripe. If a creature has feathers, flies, and sings, then it almost certainly lays eggs. This is Type 1 in operation. However, when it comes to something more important such as who to vote for in an election, one might expect Type 2 to kick in. For example, we might consider various factors such as the policies of the candidate, the candidate's probity, or how much money has been spent on the campaign. Essentially, we at least want someone who is competent. Or who looks competent. In fact, looking at someone's face for a few seconds, or even milliseconds, might be enough. Todorov, Mandisodza, Goren, and Hall (2005) decided to see if there were heuristics people used to judge competence. They asked approximately a thousand people to rate photographs of people in terms of how competent they looked. What their participants didn't realize was that they were looking at photographs of candidates for the US Senate and House of Representatives in three elections. People's judgements of whether someone looked competent correlated significantly with the actual election results. People picked candidates who were actually elected 66% to 73% of the time. They got the same results by asking people to look at a photo for just one second. Todorov et al. (2005) concluded that people's voting behaviour was likely to be influenced by an unconscious, initial, and intuitive reaction to what the candidate looked like.

In a follow-up series of experiments, Ballew and Todorov (2007) presented the photographs of 89 (unfamiliar) candidates for gubernatorial elections in the United States and again asked participants to judge which one they thought looked the most competent. In different conditions, participants were presented with the photographs for either 100 milliseconds, 250 milliseconds or until the participant made a choice. Even after only 100 milliseconds exposure, participants chose the winning candidate better than chance. In a second experiment, participants were asked to deliberate and think carefully before choosing rather than rely on ‘gut feelings'. Perhaps surprisingly, performance in the deliberate condition was poorer than in the 100 millisecond and 25 millisecond conditions. The ‘competent looking face' was an effective heuristic in choosing who might win an election. Their final experiment involved collecting competence judgements before the 2006 election. Once again, these judgements predicted 68.6% of the gubernatorial election results and 72.4% of the Senate ones. The results can be interpreted as evidence for a peripheral route appearing to influence voting choices more than the central route. It also suggests that people in general may be choosing to vote for candidates based largely on superficial features. This suggests a further question: to what extent are we consciously aware of the reasons for our choices?