The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,27

seemed to be the least expressive of the three. It also isn’t the case that Jennings is simply someone who has a happy expression on his face all the time. Again, the opposite seemed to be true. On the “happy” segments inserted for comparison purposes, he scored 14.13, which was substantially lower than both Rather and Brokaw. The only possible conclusion, according to the study, is that Jennings exhibited a “significant and noticeable bias in facial expression” toward Reagan.

Now here is where the study gets interesting. Mullen and his colleagues then called up people in a number of cities around the country who regularly watch the evening network news and asked them who they voted for. In every case, those who watched ABC voted for Reagan in far greater numbers than those who watched CBS or NBC. In Cleveland, for example, 75 percent of ABC watchers voted Republican, versus 61.9 percent of CBS or NBC viewers. In Williamstown, Massachusetts, ABC viewers were 71.4 percent for Reagan versus 50 percent for the other two networks; in Erie, Pennsylvania, the difference was 73.7 percent to 50 percent. The subtle pro Reagan bias in Jennings’s face seems to have influenced the voting behavior of ABC viewers.

As you can imagine, ABC News disputes this study vigorously. (“It’s my understanding that I’m the only social scientist to have the dubious distinction of being called a ‘jackass’ by Peter Jennings,” says Mullen.) It is hard to believe. Instinctively, I think, most of us would probably assume that the causation runs in the opposite direction, that Reagan supporters are drawn to ABC because of Jennings’s bias, not the other way around. But Mullen argues fairly convincingly that this isn’t plausible. For example, on other, more obvious levels—like, for example, story selection—ABC was shown to be the network most hostile to Reagan, so it’s just as easy to imagine hard core Republicans deserting ABC news for the rival networks. And to answer the question of whether his results were simply a fluke, four years later, in the Michael Dukakis–George Bush campaign, Mullen repeated his experiment, with the exact same results. “Jennings showed more smiles when referring to the Republican candidate than the Democrat,” Mullen said, “and again in a phone survey, viewers who watch ABC were more likely to have voted for Bush.”

Here is another example of the subtleties of persuasion. A large group of students were recruited for what they were told was a market research study by a company making high tech headphones. They were each given a headset and told that the company wanted to test to see how well they worked when the listener was in motion—dancing up and down, say, or moving his or her head. All of the students listened to songs by Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles, and then heard a radio editorial arguing that tuition at their university should be raised from its present level of $587 to $750. A third were told that while they listened to the taped radio editorial they should nod their heads vigorously up and down. The next third were told to shake their heads from side to side. The final third were the control group. They were told to keep their heads still. When they were finished, all the students were given a short questionnaire, asking them questions about the quality of the songs and the effect of the shaking. Slipped in at the end was the question the experimenters really wanted an answer to: “What do you feel would be an appropriate dollar amount for undergraduate tuition per year?”

The answers to that question are just as difficult to believe as the answers to the newscasters poll. The students who kept their heads still were unmoved by the editorial. The tuition amount that they guessed was appropriate was $582—or just about where tuition was already. Those who shook their heads from side to side as they listened to the editorial—even though they thought they were simply testing headset quality—disagreed strongly with the proposed increase. They wanted tuition to fall on average to $467 a year. Those who were told to nod their heads up and down, meanwhile, found the editorial very persuasive. They wanted tuition to rise, on average, to $646. The simple act of moving their heads up and down, ostensibly for another reason entirely—was sufficient to cause them to recommend a policy that would take money out of their own pockets. Somehow nodding, in the end, mattered as much as Peter Jennings’s