The Professor Will See You Now: Whatever

4 min read29 November

In an occasional series, Professor Philip Cowley offers a political science lesson for The House’s readers. This week: whatever

Almost exactly 100 years ago, in October 1924, the spinal specialist Clement Jeffrey gave a lecture at Mortimer Hall on the subject of “nerves”. He advised his audience to avoid talking about politics before going to bed. “All such disputations,” he said, “produce bad temper, disturb sleep and tend to exhaust the nervous system.”

He added that frequent general elections were, from the strictly physiological standpoint, “disastrous to the nervous stability of politicians in particular and the public generally”. A week later, in another talk, he advised those going out to vote to skip a meal to increase their mental faculties when in the polling station.

It’s easy to condemn someone from the other lot and easy to find excuses when it is one of your own

It is never good to speak ill of the dead, but now that he is no longer with us I feel safe in saying that, methodologically speaking, Mr Jeffrey’s work does seem to have had more than a whiff of the Making It Up As You Go Along approach about it.

That doesn’t necessarily mean he was wrong, though. Last week I read an article about the 2020 US election which showed that caring about elections did indeed affect your emotional status. Overall, Joe Biden’s election four years ago had the effect of lowering levels of political anxiety among American voters. Yet the effect was not uniform and those who were highly politically engaged or interested in politics were more anxious after the election than those who had tuned out. Don’t worry, be happy.

On an entirely unrelated subject – but then again, perhaps not – last week I also read a paper looking at how American voters reacted to politicians who had been accused of sexual misconduct. It asked respondents to consider a hypothetical candidate, from the same party as they supported, who was running for governor. The same party bit is important: it’s easy to condemn someone from the other lot and easy to find excuses when it is one of your own.

The researchers split their sample into two: half of respondents were shown some boilerplate information about the candidate; the other half were told that he had been accused of sexual harassment and had settled out of court.

Unsurprisingly, the allegations had an electoral cost – those who were told about the harassment allegations were less likely to continue to support the candidate than those who were not. But the neat bit about this study is that it asked those who were still prepared to back the guy why they did so.

The most common reason was what is called “moral licensing”, where – to quote from the paper – “past good deeds can liberate individuals to engage in behaviours that are immoral, unethical, or otherwise problematic”. That accounted for just under half of the respondents.

The second most common strategy was straight-forward disbelief; over a quarter of respondents dismissed the allegations as fake news or similar.

What I find really striking about this study is that this effect manifested itself in response to an entirely hypothetical scenario. In a real-world case, with flesh-and-blood candidates and bona fide policy outcomes, you could well imagine that all sorts of moral compromises manifest themselves. Doing the right thing in the real world often has a cost, and sometimes the better angels of our nature don’t triumph.

But here, asked about a literal paper candidate and with no consequences whatsoever, you could give the socially desirable “right” answer entirely cost-free. And yet plenty of people did not. He may be a sexual predator, the argument seemed to be, but at least he’s our sexual predator. Maybe these people were just being more honest.

Further reading: K Smith et al, On pins and needles: anxiety, politics and the 2020 US Presidential election, Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties (2023); M Savani and S Collignon, Moral licence and disbelief: how voters look past political misconduct, Political Research Exchange (2024)

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