Page 107 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

100 The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

• separating events (splitting): Politicians, when it is technically possible, try
to divide information about positive events into a number of independently
presented pieces of news.

The implications for the politicians are as follows: If two pieces of bad
news appear at the same time, they will do less harm to the party’s or poli-
tician’s image than if they appear separately. In contrast, if good news is
distributed over time—for instance, if each piece of good news appears in
a different edition of a newspaper—it will be more profitable for a party or
politician than if the news items were all published at the same time.
Gibson (1999) presented a number of observations concerning political
and economic behaviors that are in compliance with these two principles,
including by-election policy and the case of interest rate control in the
British money market in various years of the government’s term of office.
Particular applications of these principles of mental accounting are also
presented in Cwalina, Falkowski, and Newman (2011).
The classic research by Kahneman and Tversky (1979) has also encour-
aged the broad application of positive and negative framing to control the
persuasive appeal of messages dealing with daily societal issues. Such mes-
sages are commonly used by politicians to shape particular attitudes to-
ward various methods of dealing with these issues, thus influencing
electoral preferences. These applications are accompanied by the explica-
tion of the psychological mechanisms accountable for their persuasive ap-
peal and the way in which they influence the competitive electoral
market.
anxiety, negative framing, and competitive democracies. The classic
approach to framing in accordance with prospect theory has proved that
the persuasive appeal of information is greater when presented in negative,
rather than positive, framing. Both positive and negative framing directly
address the motivational process of approaching or avoiding a given situ-
ation, leading to a decrease or increase in alertness regarding the antici-
pated positive or negative consequences of the experienced situation. This
increase or decrease in alertness is modified by the affect evoked by the
way in which a given situation is presented. Positive frames, which depict
a situation in terms of gains, evoke positive affect as predicted by prospect
theory. Conversely, negative frames, which highlight the danger of loss,
evoke negative affect.
The psychological processing of the information presented in these two
opposing perspectives involves motivational processes, but it is also influ-
enced by affective processes. Affect not only accompanies the cognitive
process of understanding a given situation, presented in either a positive