Candidate Performance and Observable Audience Response: Laughter and Applause-Cheering During the First 2016 Clinton-Trump Presidential Debate.

Raucous audience applause-cheering, laughter, and even booing by a passionately involved electorate marked the 2016 presidential debates from the start of the primary season. While the presence and intensity of these observable audience responses (OARs) can be expected from partisan primary debates, the amount of not just laughter, but also applause-cheering and booing during the first general election debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was unprecedented. Such norm-violating audience behavior raises questions concerning not just the presence, strength, and timing of these OAR, but also their influence on those watching on television, streaming video, or listening to radio. This report presents findings from three interconnected studies. Study 1 provides a baseline for analysis by systematically coding the studio audience response in terms of utterance type (laughter, applause-cheering, booing, and mixtures), when and how intensely it occurred, and in response to which candidate. Study 2 uses observational analysis of 362 undergraduate students at a large state university in the southern United States who watched the debate on seven different news networks in separate rooms and evaluated the candidates' performance. Study 2 considered co-occurrence of OAR in the studio audience and in the field study rooms, finding laughter predominated and was more likely to co-occur than other OAR types. When standardized cumulative strength of room OAR was compared, findings suggest co-occurring OAR was stronger than that occurring solely in the field study rooms. Analysis of truncated data allowing for consideration of studio audience OAR intensity found that OAR intensity was not related to OAR type occurring in the field study rooms, but had a small effect on standardized cumulative strength. Study 3 considers the results of a continuous response measure (CRM) dial study in which 34 West Texas community members watched and rated the candidates during the first debate. Findings suggest that applause-cheering significantly influenced liking of the speaking candidate, whereas laughter did not. Further, response to applause-cheering was mediated by party identity, although not for laughter. Conclusions from these studies suggest laughter as being more stereotypic and likely to be mimicked whereas applause-cheering may be more socially contagious.

Explaining Extremity in Evaluation of Group Members: Meta-Analytic Tests of Three Theories.

A meta-analysis that included more than 1,100 effect sizes tested the predictions of three theoretical perspectives that explain evaluative extremity in social judgment: complexity-extremity theory, subjective group dynamics model, and expectancy-violation theory. The work seeks to understand the ways in which group-based information interacts with person-based information to influence extremity in evaluations. Together, these three theories point to the valence of person-based information, group membership of the evaluated targets relative to the evaluator, status of the evaluators' ingroup, norm consistency of the person-based information, and incongruency of person-based information with stereotype-based expectations as moderators. Considerable support, but some limiting conditions, were found for each theoretical perspective. Implications of the results are discussed.

Hierarchy, Dominance, and Deliberation: Egalitarian Values Require Mental Effort.

Hierarchy and dominance are ubiquitous. Because social hierarchy is early learned and highly rehearsed, the value of hierarchy enjoys relative ease over competing egalitarian values. In six studies, we interfere with deliberate thinking and measure endorsement of hierarchy and egalitarianism. In Study 1, bar patrons' blood alcohol content was correlated with hierarchy preference. In Study 2, cognitive load increased the authority/hierarchy moral foundation. In Study 3, low-effort thought instructions increased hierarchy endorsement and reduced equality endorsement. In Study 4, ego depletion increased hierarchy endorsement and caused a trend toward reduced equality endorsement. In Study 5, low-effort thought instructions increased endorsement of hierarchical attitudes among those with a sense of low personal power. In Study 6, participants' thinking quickly allocated more resources to high-status groups. Across five operationalizations of impaired deliberative thought, hierarchy endorsement increased and egalitarianism receded. These data suggest hierarchy may persist in part because it has a psychological advantage.

Low-effort thought promotes political conservatism.

The authors test the hypothesis that low-effort thought promotes political conservatism. In Study 1, alcohol intoxication was measured among bar patrons; as blood alcohol level increased, so did political conservatism (controlling for sex, education, and political identification). In Study 2, participants under cognitive load reported more conservative attitudes than their no-load counterparts. In Study 3, time pressure increased participants' endorsement of conservative terms. In Study 4, participants considering political terms in a cursory manner endorsed conservative terms more than those asked to cogitate; an indicator of effortful thought (recognition memory) partially mediated the relationship between processing effort and conservatism. Together these data suggest that political conservatism may be a process consequence of low-effort thought; when effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases.

The existence bias.

The authors demonstrate that people treat the mere existence of something as evidence of its goodness. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrate that an existing state is evaluated more favorably than an alternative. Study 3 shows that imagining an event increases estimates of its likelihood, which in turn leads to favorable evaluation; the more likely that something will be, the more positively it is evaluated. Study 4 shows that the more a form is described as prevalent, the more aesthetically attractive is that form. This indicates a causal relationship between aesthetic judgments and existence in a domain lacking choice among alternatives. Study 5 extends the existence bias to gustatory evaluation and demonstrates that the effect is not moderated by valence. Together these studies suggest that mere existence leads to assumptions of goodness; the status quo is seen as good, right, attractive, tasty, and desirable.

Getting more from success: standard raising as esteem maintenance.

In 4 studies, the authors tested the hypothesis that success prompts standard raising and that doing so helps maintain performance-related esteem by augmenting perceptions of competence. Study 1 showed that students raised examination standards following success in meeting them. In Study 2, professors who were recently promoted to tenure raised what they thought were the publication standards at their university, compared with the standards of their nonpromoted counterparts. Supporting the authors' esteem-maintenance account, participants in Study 3 reported that they would feel better meeting a high standard by a small margin than meeting a low standard by a large margin, and competence attributions mediated this relationship. Participants in Study 4 raised standards when their esteem was threatened but not when it was affirmed, also supporting an esteem-maintenance account. Alternative interpretations of standard raising, including goals for future improvement and initial standard lowering, were not supported in these studies.

Responding to deviance: target exclusion and differential devaluation.

Two studies explored responses to ingroup deviance. Group-defining opinions of prowar Republicans (Study 1) and prolife Christians (Study 2) were challenged by either an ingroup or outgroup deviate. Participants evaluated the deviate and structured the boundaries of their ingroup in counterbalanced order. Of importance, boundary structuring allowed participants to exclude deviates from the ingroup. Consistent with previous research, ingroup deviates were devalued relative to out-group deviates, but only when target evaluation was participants' first response option. Participants excluded deviates from the boundaries of their ingroup irrespective of measure order, and doing so eliminated differential devaluation when exclusion was participants' first response option. Exclusion decreased liking for outgroup deviates in Study 1 and increased liking for ingroup deviates in Study 2. The findings suggest that devaluation is an attempt to exclude deviates from the ingroup and that doing so reduces the threat otherwise experienced.