Real reason why some politicians are still 'trusted'! , Defend Your Research: People Often Trust Eloquence More Than Honesty - Harvard Business Review

Defend Your Research: People Often Trust Eloquence More Than Honesty - Harvard Business Review:

Real reason why some politicians are still 'trusted'!

"Rogers: In our study, subjects found the candidate answering a similar but different question just as trustworthy and likable as when he answered the original question. What’s more, after hearing an artful dodge, subjects had much lower recall of the question asked; in some of our studies, less than half could remember it accurately. If anything, that result is artificially high, since when we asked them to recall the question, we gave them four options, so they had a 25% chance of guessing correctly. But the important finding is that the audience didn’t penalize a speaker who dodged a question well.

Norton: But you had to be good at it, and you couldn’t be obvious. When the candidate answered a completely different question, he was penalized heavily and rated less likable and trustworthy. Interestingly, people were much better at recalling the actual question in those cases.

After we did this research, we really paid attention to the national elections. We noticed how some politicians seemed to have mastered this skill. Hillary Clinton was phenomenal at dodging questions. Looking back, Ronald Reagan was a master dodger, too."