The Research Challenge

Lucid has deep experience in political and opinion research. We have helped news organizations understand implicit emotional responses to political debates and we have performed extensive laboratory and online experiments examining the impacts of hope- and fear-based messaging in political campaigns and advertising. This experience has led us to identify two core research challenges in this field.

First, political actors (candidates) and observers (the media) need to better understand how political messaging is really received and processed by voters and citizens. This is particularly true for negative messaging, which works in some contexts but can seriously backfire in others. Political advertising and campaign rhetoric are very difficult to assess with traditional methods like focus groups and opinion surveys, and decisions made on the basis of faulty data are hard to reverse in the fast-paced context of an ongoing campaign.

Second, public opinion polling needs a better way to measure the strength and depth of political beliefs and opinions expressed by survey respondents. A minority of citizens have strong and stable political beliefs, but for the majority, political views are loosely held and mercurial. This cannot be easily ascertained by asking more survey questions, because people are reluctant to admit that they are not deeply interested in or knowledgeable about political questions. The result is that public opinion polls sometimes go very wrong, embarrassing the organizations that conduct them, and misdirecting campaigns and candidates to the wrong expectations and conclusions.

Why Neuroscience Matters

Because political opinion and participation is essentially an emotion-driven experience for most people, but disguised as a topic of rational discourse, neurometrics are required to get below the rational surface and chart the emotional core below. Expressed opinions can be shallow and ephemeral, but underlying emotional responses can be deep and long-lasting. These emotional propensities are likely to be more influential than rational arguments in an actual voting situation, especially for those in the ideological center of the electorate.

In addition, testing of political advertising can greatly benefit from the use of neurometric measures. Campaign teams can see how ads perform in the the real world context of an ad-saturated market in which every spot is countered by an opponent's spot, and capturing attention may be far more important than delivering a nuanced message.

Finally, candidates and political parties operate very much like brands in voters' minds. They quicky become represented as simple constructs that can be called to mind quickly and act as stand-ins for more complex assessments in decision-making contexts like voting. Brand evaluation techniques such as our BrandMindshare™ Metrics methodology can be very useful for understanding how political brands perform over time.

How Lucid Can Help ...