Bad Youth Coverage Can be Damaging to Turnout

Michael recently called out the New York Times on their dismal profile of Declare Yourself for subliminally playing into the popular fallacies about the youth vote and youth turnout. Unfortunately, this is just one example in a long-standing problem with media coverage of young voters.

As it turns out, these repeated fallacies about young people being apathetic, not turning out, et al may be more damaging than we previously thought. To uncover the hidden damage done by the media's false narrative we must look into the field of social psychology.

In Dr. Robert Cialdini's Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, there is a chapter on commitment and consistency. Here is a passage that may help shed some light on the potential negative effects of this narrative:

What those around us think is true of us is enormously important in determining what we ourselves think is true. For example, one study found that after hearing that they were considered charitable people, New Haven, Connecticut, housewives gave much more money to a canvasser from the Multiple Sclerosis Association. Apparently the mere knowledge that someone viewed them as charitable caused these women to make their actions consistent with another's perception of them.

Potential young voters are constantly hearing that they do not vote, will not vote, and that they don't care. The danger lying herein is that some young voters that are not directly engaged may act, or not act as it is, because of unconscious consistency.

This may seem like a bunch of crap psycho-babble, but think about it for a moment. How often have we seen organizations talk about how to make voting "cool?" There have been efforts to combat a negative stigma towards political engagement and voting. We have a situation where the media says that young people don't vote, a young person may think: "I'm young. Nobody expects me to vote anyway. Other young people aren't voting. Why bother?"

This is a big reason why it is important to push back on these fallacious media narratives about young voters.

On the bright side, good media coverage and stories about young people getting involved have that positive effect on young voters. Good coverage also provides social proof that other young people are being engaged and voting.

This is also another reason why vote pledges are so important. As I wrote in an earlier post a while back, vote pledges involve an even more powerful use of the principles of commitment and consistency. The individual pledge to vote, a personal act of commitment, overwhelms the effect of demographic consistency.

What do you think? Does the false media narrative potentially lead to this danger, or am I just spouting psychobabble? Share your thoughts in the comments.