Reagan vs Obama and McCain

I thought it would be interesting to look at the level of spin in Reagan’s speeches. He shares some characteristics with Obama; not in political opinions but in his ability to motivate an audience, and to be resistant to potentially embarrassing factual issues.
Here is the plot from yesterday’s post comparing Obama and McCain since their conventions, with five campaign speeches (all I could find) by Reagan between the convention and the 1980 election.

Comparing the spin of Reagan, Obama, and McCain

The points with red stars are Reagan’s speeches. As you can see, his level of spin is much higher than either of today’s candidates. The ability to use high levels of spin without coming across as phony is, of course, what makes an actor, so this is not entirely surprising. And I’ve argued all along that high levels of spin pay off for a politician, and the ability to give high-spin speeches especially to people who do not already like you is a key asset for a politician. Reagan is a good example of this in action.

Spin scores to the end of October

Here is the analysis of levels of spin in Obama and McCain’s speeches up to a few days ago. Usual labelling (refer to previous posts for background).

Spin scores (red - McCain, blue - Obama)

The most obvious thing to see in this plot is how McCain’s speeches all tend to lie on one side of the deceptiveness axis while Obama’s tend to lie on the other side. This is because McCain has started using motion words at high rates (and Obama does not). This has a small effect on deceptiveness score, but rates of use of motion verbs are not all that important to signalling deception.

The individual levels of spin from the convention to the end of October are here:

McCain

Obama

The last time I posted was during the period where Obama’s level of spin was quite low. As you can see, it has risen sharply again in the past week. This suggests that he is not as confident of winning now as he was then — he has consistently shown a pattern of stepping out from his facade and using lower spin when he feels confident about winning.

Concluding thoughts on spin the U.S. presidential election

When people think about spin and politicians, they usually assume that spin has to do with either presenting widely agreed facts in a way that puts a particular politician in the best light, or altering the facts by exaggerating or misremembering. Media people are always slightly puzzled when they reveal this kind of spin and find that it has little or no resonance with voters. Hillary Clinton’s memory of landing under sniper fire was a one-day wonder, not a deal-breaker. And there have been many other examples of this kind of spin on both sides during the U.S. presidential campaign, and they have had little impact.

This is because voters don’t choose politicians because of how clever their ideas are , whether they agree with these ideas, or even whether they are noticeably competent (history shows). They don’t listen to the candidates’ speeches and parse them for content. They vote for candidates with whom they feel some kind of resonance. And so they look for features of the candidates as people with which they can identify.

A simple way to say this is that voters look for character rather than policy. But this is still a bit misleading — they don’t don’t think about character in moral terms, but in relationship terms. Not “Is this candidate a good person” but “is this candidate a bit like me”. Moral issues do come into play, but only for those voters to whom moral issues are part of their own self image.

The kind of spin I’ve been following through the U.S. election campaign addresses this issue of presentation, that is to what extent do candidates present themselves, as people, in ways that are not congruent with who they really are, as people. In other words, to what extent do they present a persona or facade that is designed to appeal to a wider range of voters than the unadorned person would?

For both John McCain and Hillary Clinton, the short version is that they have, in general, presented something close to the real person. (This may, of course, be because they developed a political persona that they’ve been using so long that it has become the real them.) There have been ups and downs, and it’s been possible to see what might be going through the mind of the candidate and/or the campaign at certain critical moments, but overall they have presented a consistent persona that seems close to their real personality.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, has consistently presented a persona that does not seem to be very close to the real Obama, about whom we can only guess. This is starting to be more widely appreciated. I’ve heard several commentators say how they find him inscrutable because they simply can’t see the real person behind the presentation.

Spin is only one factor in how voters decide who to vote for, so I can’t make a prediction about who will win tomorrow. What I think is predictable is that, if Obama wins, his approval ratings will drop quite quickly when he becomes president — he simply cannot be all of the things that people are projecting on to him, many of them mutually contradictory. And, as president, his actions will speak louder and more clearly than his campaign speeches about who he really is.

Update — Spin in US Presidential Election

I’ve looked at the spin in the speeches in the last few weeks, more or less since the convention. The overall picture has remained very similar to earlier stages: Obama’s levels of spin are relatively high compared to McCain’s.

Here is the overall spin plot:

Spin between the conventions and the last week of October

Here are the plots over time for McCain:

McCain's spin

and Obama:

The most interesting thing here is how much Obama’s level of spin has dropped in the last few speeches. This is very similar to what happened in the weeks (late February) when it became clear that he would get the Democratic nomination. When he feels sure of himself, he steps out from behind his election facade and presents himself much more openly. The extremely low-spin speech is his comedy routine at the Al Smith dinner — presumably the expectation that he should be funny rather than serious made him feel as if he had permission to be himself.

McCain’s high-spin speeches are those when he gives economic history lessons, unlike his typical speech in which he puts more of himself.

Spin — the technical basis

The work on spin that I’ve written about here is based primarily on the work of Pennebaker’s group at the University of Texas, Austin. The primary reference is here. The model is based on empirical studies of deception in settings where the ground truth is known, and has, by now, been validated many times. When someone is being deceptive, there will be characteristic changes in the ways they use certain words. Deception here means, of course, saying things that the speaker does not believe to be (entirely) true, not things that are factually incorrect.

Of course, this is domain dependent, so we can’t judge how deceptive politicians are in comparison to, say, used-car salesmen or nuns.

The use of the word “spin” rather than deception acknowledges the fact that there are differences between explicit intent to deceive and implicit, unconscious desire to present oneself as better (along some set of dimensions) than one actually is. This kind of self-improvement happens in job interviews, dating, and in politics.

And we don’t condemn someone for being deceptive when they make an initial offer in a negotiation, but the same kind of signals will appear in their language use.

The interesting thing is not so much that politicians try to appeal to as many people as possible, at the expense of strict accuracy, but that there are differences in how much this happens — changing over short time scales for a single person, and at longer time scales for a campaign; and that there are systematic differences between campaigns. There is a great deal of evidence that the properties mediated by changes in language patterns are not under conscious control (see e.g. Pennebaker and Chung) so they provide an insight into campaigns that is hard for the campaigns to obscure.

Election spin results covered by New Scientist

There’s an article on, among other things, my work on spin the US election campaign in this week’s issue of New Scientist. You can find it online here. There are also some interesting results from the people who look at facial expressions (pioneered by Ekman) and so voice analysis.

Canadian Federal Election — first analysis

I’ve done some analysis of the party leader speeches from the first week of campaigning. I am somewhat hampered by lack of data; only one speech by Jack Layton has been posted, and there are only three by Dion.

About the only conclusion so far is that language patterns are all over the place. There is no consistency in any of the campaigns. This might be because speechwriters are still settling in (but surely Harper’s at least must have known the election was coming?). Or it may be that all of the campaigns are unsure of their strategies in some less-conscious way. But it’s interesting, and slightly puzzling.

I’ll await more data.

Comparing the Democratic and Republican convention spin

Just to round out the picture, here’s data comparing the levels of spin across the speeches from both conventions.

Spin levels in both conventions

As usual, high spin is indicated by the red end of the line. Here are the spin scores for all of the speeches analyzed (positive numbers are high spin):

1. Bush 0.40
2. Thompson 1.71
3. Lieberman -0.73
4. Romney 4.36
5. Huckabee -1.8
6. Giuliani 2.97
7. Palin -0.62
8. McCain -7.38
9. M. Obama -1.24
10. Hillary Clinton 2.43
11. Bill Clinton 0.99
12. Biden -1.35
13. Obama 0.31

The relative positions don’t change much when compared to the other party. Within each party, there’s the same division into high- and low-spin speakers. McCain’s overall spin is still so low that it makes all of the other politicians look as if they are clustered quite close together, but there are actually quite large differences between them.

Note the cluster of Bush, Palin, Bill Clinton, and Biden who have very similar speech patterns. Perhaps this is the sign of a successful politician?

RNC convention spin summary

McCain’s speech last night had extremely low spin, mostly because of the very high rate of first-person singular pronoun use, almost twice the rate of Bush and Huckabee. It’s so large that it almost washes out the differences in the rates of use of other word classes.

Here’s the plot:

RNC speech spin

The speeches are in chronological order: 1 – Bush, 2-Thompson, 3-Lieberman, 4-Romney, 5-Huckabee, 6-Giuliani, 7-Palin, 8-McCain.

Note the alternating pattern of high and low spin, which is also characteristic of speeches on the campaign trail. We suspect that this is the result of (probably subconscious) awareness of spin that feeds into the scheduling.

The actual spin scores (positive means high spin are)

Bush -0.92
Thompson 4.02
Lieberman -0.95
Romney 2.43
Huckabee -1.88
Giuliani 3.72
Palin 1.17
McCain -7.58 (!!)

Spin in the RNC convention speeches

I’ll do a complete analysis after McCain’s speech tonight, but so far:

High spin: Thompson, Romney, Giuliani — all about the same level of spin but for different reasons.

Low spin: Bush, Lieberman, Huckabee — all about the same

Palin’s level of spin is almost exactly in between these two groups.

Of course, adding McCain’s speech to the mix may change the absolute positions of these speeches, as Obama’s did to the Clintons’ speeches at the DNC (see last week’s posts).

I’ll do the combined analysis too, to get a sense of how different the two parties are in their lanaguage use — stay tuned.

Update on spin in presidential elections

I was away for three weeks, and it’s taken me three weeks to catch up and be able to post again (although sporadically for a while).

I’ve worked through the candidate speeches since the beginning of the year. There’s  a lot to look at: what was the effect of Clinto dropping out of the race, and the transition to general-election mode?

Here’s the short version: Obama continues to use high levels of spin, after a brief period (between the time he had the primary won and the Pastor Wright affair) when his levels of spin were reduced. McCain has increased his level of spin so that it’s little different from that of Obama — his straight talk levels dropped off a cliff once Obama became the presumptive nominee.

Here’s the overall plot of spin:

Spin levels to July 16th

The red dots are McCain speeches; the blue dots, Clinton speeches; and the blue stars, Obama speeches. The speeches for each candidate are numbered in time order: 1-32 Clinton, 33-77 McCain, 78-128 Obama. Note that Clinton now looks like the straight-talking candidate, because the calculation of spin is done relative to all of the speeches over the past 7 months.

Here are the spin scores for each candidate individually, in time order:

Clinton Jan 2008 to her withdrawal

McCain Jan 2008 to July 16

Obama Jan 2008 to July 16th

The change in McCain’s levels of straight talking are by far the most noticeable. Obama has had a few flashes of straight talk, but he seems most comfortable using moderate levels of spin.

Of course, spin works and that is why both candidates are using it. But neither can really claim that their campaign is not politics as usual.

Travelling

I’m off on a round the Pacific trip, and won’t be able to post again until the last week of June.

If you happen to be in Sydney, I’ll be speaking:

• On Wednesday June 4th at the University of Sydney about how to find anomalous regions in graph/relational data;
• On Wednesday June 11th at the University of Technology on our work detecting deception in text;

I’m then heading to the Intelligence and Security Informatics conference in Taipei where I’ll be:

• On a panel at the Pacific Asia Workshop on Intelligence and Security about the relationship between privacy and intelligence informatics;
• Speaking about our work on deception detection in testimony;
• Presenting results showing that many mainstream prediction and clustering technologies are relatively easily manipulated by an adversary who can get access (even very limited access) to the data.

What can be learned from text II

Today let me talk about the internal state channel and what can be learned from it.

First, let me point out that this channel is even more driven by subconscious processes, so we have very little control over it, even if we know how it works. This makes it very revealing.

Some of the properties that can be inferred from the internal state channel are:

• personality. This is useful in many adversarial situations because you can’t usually get an adversary to sit down and take an MMPI test. Several ways to categorize personality from word usage have been developed, although they are obviously somewhat limited.
• status of each participant in a conversation. In general, lower status participants tend to use first-person singular pronouns at higher rates, which gives clues about how each participant regards him/herself with respect to the others involved.
• health. The health of an individual going forward for several months can be predicted by flexibility in pronoun use. This is a bit different from the other categories because it doesn’t rely on a particular signature of word frequencies, but on the ability of each individual to vary his/her word usage widely over time. In other words, unhealthy people maintain a single perspective on the world, and so use consistent pronouns to describe themselves and those around them; healthier people have a changing perspective that is reflected in changing pronouns. (Note the connections to first position, second position etc. associated with NLP and its antecedent psychological approaches.)
• stress/depression. This is related to the previous category, but both stress and depression show up in characteristic ways in word usage. In the case of depression, the changes continue even after the depression ends, so that the never-depressed differ from the once-depressed.
• community involvement or embeddedness. The way in which first-person singular and plural pronouns are used gives clues about how an individual feels in relation to a community.
• deception. I’ve written extensively about this in previous posts.

Much of these results are the work of James Pennebaker and his group at the University of Texas at Austin. His work (here) is quite accessible. The paper by Chung and Pennebaker is particularly relevant.

Spin in the US Presidential Primaries — Summary

As we enter what looks like it might be the end phase of the primary season, I thought I would summarize what I’ve written about spin during the process.

1. What is spin? People often talk about spin as messing with the content of a communication: leaving bits out, or changing the emphasis. What I’m talking about here is a mental (unconscious) process where a person presents themselves or their content in a way that does not reflect what they know to be true about it. Politicians (and the rest of us) do this, to some extent, all of the time — trying to make a good impression. For a politician, outright lying is a poor idea (recall Clinton under sniper fire) but there is a lot of pressure to be “all things to all men”. Because the communication is not the speaker’s natural persona, this kind of spin produces a detectable signature in the communication.
2. What is the model of spin (deception)? This work is based on Pennebaker’s empirically-derived model of word-usage changes when people are being deceptive. This model is characterized by (a) reduced rates of first-person singular pronouns; (b) reduced rates of exclusive words, words that mark the beginning of a phrase or clause that qualifies or refines what has gone before; (c) increased rates of negative-emotion words; and (d) increased rates of action verbs. These changes are unconsciously produced, so cannot be directly altered by a speaker, even one who knows the model. Although the model was developed for plain deception (outright lying) it seems to detect deception across the full range from lying, through spin, to negotiating and dating.
3. Why does there have to be a context? Because the model relies on increases and decreases in word-usage rates, there must be some kind of context of similar communications or documents to be able to tell whether a given frequency represents an increase or a decrease. Therefore, absolute spin scores cannot be determined — instead we can only rank a set of communications from most to least spinful. Even within the context of the presidential primaries, underlying language use has changed, most obviously from a ”getting to know me” phase to a “getting to know my policies” phase.
4. The early primaries. From the beginning of 2008 until the 3rd week of February, all three candidates were introducing themselves. In the speeches given during this period, McCain has the least spin, followed by Clinton, followed by Obama, with noticeably higher levels of spin. McCain generally used (and uses) high rates of first-person singular pronouns, justifying his ’straight talk” claim; Clinton generally used high rates of exclusive words, adding refinement and qualification to many of her statements. Obama’s speeches were lacking in both: he used “we” at extremely high rates (and “I” hardly at all), and his statements were simple and declarative. This makes for speeches that are light on content but, when well delivered, emotionally uplifting. (Reading Obama’s speeches rather than hearing makes one wonder what all the fuss is about — the speeches themselves are rather dry, and the delivery is everything.)
5. Obama decides he’s won. Over the weekend of February 24th, Obama’s language patterns changed dramatically, becoming very similar to Clinton’s. I conclude that this weekend his campaign did the calculations and decided that Clinton could not win the nomination (which seemed, and seems, mathematically true). He cannot have consciously altered his speech patterns, so this must the result of reframing what’s going on to himself — presumably stepping out from behind the persona he had been using before that and presenting something closer to his real self.
6. The past month. In the past month, both Obama and Clinton show higher levels of spin whenever the pressure on them has increased, and they have become defensive. For example, Obama’s levels of spin jumped back to January levels when the Wright controversy became public. In such situations, Obama’s level of spin is characteristically higher than Clinton’s.
7. Responses versus statements. It is difficult to analyze and compare the debate statements of the candidates with their speeches. The question and answer form naturally changes the rates of word usage: for example, if the question is “Would you…” it’s much more likely that the answer will begin “I will…”. And, to make matters worse, debates are not really question and answer since candidates have prepared statements for likely questions and they will use them regardless of the form (and sometimes the content) of the question. It is not yet clear how applicable the deception model is in question and answer situations, so I have not analyzed the debates, except for the most-recent — where Obama still shows up having higher spin than Clinton.
8. Does spin work? Spin is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it does work in the sense that it can make a speaker appealing to people who would otherwise not be attracted to him/her — which is why,  of course, politicians use it. On the other hand, if a candidate steps out of character, even briefly, people may realize that it is a facade and react in a strong negative way. And, to make it harder, the facade and the language usage are largely subconscious, so a candidate may misstep without realizing it.
9. “I” versus “we”. There’s a lot of (positive) discussion of Obama’s high rates of use of “we”. This pronoun is irrelevant to deception — people who are being honest or deceptive may use “we” at either high or low rates. However, the difference between using these two pronouns is partially understood. People who are being open and not status conscious typically use “I” a lot, while those who are being closed and status conscious typically use “we” a lot. In particular, “we’ is often code for “you” — commanding without creating the impression of command. In other words, “we” is a weasel word.
10. Growing into a persona. It’s possible that Clinton and McCain have been in politics so long that a persona that they originally assumed has now become so much a part of them that it has become their real personality; and that is why their levels of spin are low. By this explanation, the reason that Obama has such high levels of spin is that he’s a relative newcomer to the US national arena, and so he still “puts on” a persona. This doesn’t seem all that convincing — first, he has a long history in public life, although on a smaller stage; second, he seems to be able to step out from behind the persona when things are going well.

The analysis on which this summary is based (and the figures that go with it) can be found in earlier postings.

Clinton and Obama spin including Penn debate

Here are the results of the analysis of spin for Clinton and Obama, using speeches from 2008, and the Penn debate last night. 19 is Clinton, and 39 is Obama.

Clinton: blue dots; Obama: blue stars.

As I’ve noted before, Clinton in general uses less spin than Obama, except when she’s under pressure. It’s also clear from this figure that there is a significant difference between the two orthogonal to the line that indicates level of spin. This is almost entirely due to Clinton’s liking for action verbs, to which Obama is relatively allergic.

It’s not quite fair to compare debate content to prepared speeches, because a debate requires some level of responsiveness to questions (which changes the model of deception). However, it was clear that most of the answers last night were heavily prepped, so perhaps it’s not too different.

The striking thing is that both performances represent all-time lows in spin for both candidates. This is somewhat surprising since Clinton is presumptively in the last few days of her candidacy. Both candidates seem to have decided that they can only be who they are — which has to be a good thing.

Mind you, Obama is still in love with the pronoun “we”. He almost said “when we become president” last night!

Text in Adversarial Situations

Whenever we, as humans, write or speak we reveal something about ourselves. Part of this is what we want to reveal — the purpose of our communication. But we also reveal a great deal that we did not necessarily intend to reveal, and this is part of what makes textual analysis interesting in adversarial situations.

It’s helpful to think of what is happening when we speak or write as happening simultaneously in two channels:

1. The content channel, which serves the purpose for which the communication is intended, and is often carried by the `big’ words: nouns and verbs; and
2. The internal state channel, which reveals information about our mental state, intentions, and feelings, and is often carried by the `little’ words such as conjunctions and verbs.

The internal state channel is what we examined when looking for deception in earlier posts.

We tend to think, intuitively, that we control the content channel consciously, although we can’t control the internal state channel. In fact, we actually do not control either channel very well, at the level of details; although, of course, when we set out to say something we usually manage to get the content we want across.

When we think about communication emanating from bad guys, there are a number of different scenarios:

1. They are communicating in a public way to disseminate content. They may attempt concealment, but are aware that their communication could be intercepted both accidentally by almost anyone, and by people looking for it explicitly.
2. They are communicating in a private way to disseminate content. They will have to attempt concealment, and know that communication that is intercepted will be scrutinized carefully.
3. They are communicating in a public way, but it is their mental state that is most interesting. For example, propaganda is a form of content-filled public communication, but the mental models and intentions behind it are probably of more interest than the content.

Each of these scenarios requires a particular kind of analysis, but the overall structure is the same:

• Use selection to find potentially interesting communication in the mass of communication in today’s media and internet. This relies on modelling normality; looking for concealment; and looking for evasion (reaction to simple selection techniques).
• Use analysis techniques on the set of selected communications to extract content, authorship information, metainformation (e.g. traffic analysis), intention, emotional state, deception, and attitudes.

I’ll talk in more detail about these aspects in subsequent posts.

US presidential election spin — recent speeches

As promised, I’ve updated the plot of candidate spin to reflect only the speeches given in March.

The significance of this is that spin is always relative to some set of similar documents; and, in the Democratic campaign at least, the substance and tone of the conversation has changed substantially in the past few weeks. All candidates have moved away from presenting themselves as people to presenting their policies (McCain is back talking about himself, but this isn’t captured in this set of speeches).

9 is Obama’s race speech, 10 is his Iraq speech.

McCain still shows low levels of spin. However, the position of Obama and Clinton has largely reversed. Clinton shows high levels of spin, suggesting that her policy speeches are being simplified from the way she would usually speak (which is plausible). Obama continues to increase his level of first-person singular pronoun use, suggesting that he remains confident that he has won the nomination, despite the media’s attempts to keep stirring the pot.

Update: US presidential election spin

I’ve updated the spin analysis to reflect the speeches given up to the last weekend in March.

McCain: red dots, Clinton: blue dots; Obama: blue stars.

You can see a transition in the type of speeches, as candidates move away from speeches intended to introduce themselves as people to speeches that express policy. These look inherently more spinful compared to the earlier speeches, at least for McCain and Clinton. Arguably some of Obama’s movement is also because of the same transition.

The trends in spin are shown in the following figures:

McCain:

Clinton:

Obama:

Although there is a general trend to speeches that score higher on spin than earlier in the campaign, Obama still leads the pack in levels of spin. I will pull out the recent speeches and repeat the analysis to get a new baseline from current content, and see whether this pattern holds true. Results in a day or two.

Changing spin over time

I’ve updated yesterday’s results to include the prepared text of Obama’s speech on Iraq yesterday. The new speech, numbered 39 in the figure, is one of his most spinful.

I’ve also looked at how Clinton’s and Obama’s spin has changed over time.

Clinton started out talking fairly straight, but her spin has been increasing (lower on the graph) recently.

Obama’s level of spin has always been quite high. However, after a patch of much less spin, his last two speeches, on race and on Iraq, have had very high levels of spin.

It’s also interesting how much variation there is from speech to speech. Some of this is probably due to the topic; speeches that involve telling one’s own story naturally produce lower spin scores, and all three candidates spend some time helping people get to know them (or their personas ). There may be some variation because of which speechwriter(s) actually created the text. We were surprised, initially, that there were typical levels of spin because any speech is the product of several people, not just one. But it seems like a good speechwriter must produce something that the candidate is able to say in a natural way, and so aligns with what the candidate would have said.

I don’t know why these figures render so poorly. Any suggestions appreciated.

This is the beginning of the Easter weekend. I won’t post again until Tuesday, unless something time-sensitive happens.

Obama — return of the spin

The big speech on race that Obama made yesterday stimulated me to bring my analysis of the level of spin the candidates are using up to date.

Small clips of Obama talking about issues around his pastor sounded like they contained very high level of spin, especially wonderful phrases like “we need to think about that” (code for “YOU need to think about that”)

The figure below shows projections of all of the candidates speeches (as they appear on their websites), projected onto a axis that represents spin. The red dots are McCain speeches; the blue dots are Clinton speeches; and the blue stars are Obama speeches.

For each candidate, the speeches are in data order: 1-5 McCain; 6-21 Clinton; and 22-38 Obama.

Link to a copy for better readability (maybe)

Obama had a major reduction in spin in all of his speeches around Feb 24th. Although his speeches contain more spin than either of the other two candidates, even his speeches are of two different kinds. Some, such as 37 (US Admirals and Generals) and 28 (Reclaiming the American Dream — autobiography) have quite low spin. Others, such as yesterday’s (38), his speech when he lost Texas and Ohio (36), and his Great Need of the Hour speech (23) have high levels of spin.

You can see that the amount of spin in yesterday’s speech worked. The pundits are impressed; it’s the greatest speech about race in a generation, apparently. It was a good speech. But, perhaps, it wasn’t quite the real Obama.

I stick my my interpretation of the changing spin. Around Feb 24th Obama became convinced that he had won the nomination. Every time since then that something has happened to shed doubt on that, any kind of pressure, and he retreats behind his higher-spin language.

Clinton is also feeling the pressure. 3 of her 4 most recent speeches have had much higher levels of spin than she usually uses.

Levels of spin are not consciously controlled (see earlier posts), so they provide an insight into the mental landscape and framing that is driving each of the candidates.