If expectational influence on subsequent judgment were ever on public display, we saw it in nearly every analyst on television Thursday evening following the Vice Presidential debate. Sarah Palin’s performance in the debate was much better than what we saw in the clips from the Katie Couric interview. But really, where was there to go, for a Vice Presidential candidate, but up?

The leading edge of psychological science tells us that expectations play a strong role in how we perceive the world. Lowering expectations, and subsequently beating those expectations will provide you with more lift in positive experience  perceptions than meeting higher expectations altogether (Kunda, 1999).

Still, shouldn’t we expect our best political analysts to get beyond this?

How could we possibly say that responses like the following are acceptable enough to warrant a ‘good performance’ for a Vice Presidential candidate:

On the Economy

IFILL:

“Next question, Governor Palin, still on the economy. Last year,

Congress passed a bill that would make it more difficult for

debt-strapped mortgage-holders to declare bankruptcy, to get out form

under that debt. This is something that John McCain supported. Would you have?”

PALIN: “Yes, I would have. But here, again, there have — there have been so many changes in the conditions of our economy in just even these past weeks that there has been more and more revelation made aware now to Americans about the corruption and the greed on Wall Street.

We need to look back, even two years ago, and we need to be appreciative of John McCain’s call for reform with Fannie Mae, with Freddie Mac, with the mortgage-lenders, too, who were starting to really kind of rear that head of abuse.

And the colleagues in the Senate weren’t going to go there with him. So we have John McCain to thank for at least warning people. And we also have John McCain to thank for bringing in a bipartisan effort people to the table so that we can start putting politics aside, even putting a campaign aside, and just do what’s right to fix this economic problem that we are in.

It is a crisis. It’s a toxic mess, really, on Main Street that’s affecting Wall Street. And now we have to be ever vigilant and also making sure that credit markets don’t seize up. That’s where the Main Streeters like me, that’s where we would really feel the effects.”

On Isreal

IFILL: “What has this administration done right or wrong — this is the great, lingering, unresolved issue, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — what have they done? And is a two-state solution the solution?”

PALIN: “A two-state solution is the solution. And Secretary Rice, having recently met with leaders on one side or the other there, also, still in these waning days of the Bush administration, trying to forge that peace, and that needs to be done, and that will be top of an agenda item, also, under a McCain-Palin administration.

Israel is our strongest and best ally in the Middle East. We have got to assure them that we will never allow a second Holocaust, despite, again, warnings from Iran and any other country that would seek to destroy Israel, that that is what they would like to see.

We will support Israel. A two-state solution, building our embassy, also, in Jerusalem, those things that we look forward to being able to accomplish, with this peace-seeking nation, and they have a track record of being able to forge these peace agreements.

They succeeded
with Jordan. They succeeded with Egypt. I’m sure that we’re going to see more success there, also.

It’s got to be a commitment of the United States of America, though. And I can promise you, in a McCain-Palin administration, that commitment is there to work with our friends in Israel.”

In another context (read: one without exceptionally low expectations) these responses would be deemed dodging and incoherent, at best.

The point here is not to criticize Sarah Palin, she is doing a remarkable job under very difficult circumstances, but rather, the point is to demand better critical thinking from the media analysts who feed the American public their opinions every evening (yes, read that both ways). Why not learn from the advances in social science, and use that knowledge to inform judgments, analysis and commentary? Why not become aware of how expectations influence subsequent judgments and use that new knowledge to enhance your analyses? The social sciences are rife with knowledge not yet implemented in our daily discourse. Analysts who can harness that knowledge and deliberately use it in their work will be the best, truly independent, analysts in the business.