Smile When You Say That

While Television-watching habits are an embarrassment to some people, to Roger Masters, a Dartmouth government professor, our styles of absorbing TV messages are a research gold mine.

For a decade Masters has studied viewer reactions to televised election campaigning.

He assessed, for example, viewers' feelings toward presidential candidates Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter when they could see but not hear the two politicians. Viewers responded far more favorably to Reagan's hang-dog, nice-guy expressions than to Carter's look-them-in-the-eye mien, which viewers considered scary. The punchline: at the time, Reagan was talking about increasing nuclear arsenals while Carter was discussing letting blacks in on the American dream. Masters's findings suggested that the body language of politicians often speaks louder than the words they utter, which in turn suggests that our imagecrazed TV politicking may be harmful to the national health.

But it gets more complicated. His latest round of TV-response research reveals that black and white Americans react differently to the body-language messages of politicians. According to Masters, whites' emotional responses to viewing a politician directly influence their opinions of the candidates. A positive response results in favorable opinions. "But," says Masters, "in the 1988 presidential election, even watching Jesse Jackson and Michael Dukakis did not produce emotions that influenced the attitudes of blacks in the way that happened for whites." Whether or not a candidate is smiling doesn't really matter to blacks, he says.

Masters, whose research and writing range eclectically from Rousseau to the intersections of science, psychology, and politics, stops short of arguing that no one should be too taken in by TV images. But he regards his findings as a thermometer for measuring some of the nation's social ills. "If we are to achieve an integrated society," he says, "it will be necessary to address the emotional alienation of blacks so that they feel as much a part of the system as do whites."

Roger Masters