Implicit Appeals Research Articles

Political Speech from Corporate America: Sparse, Mostly for Democrats, and Somewhat Representative

How do corporations engage in political speech in the age of social media? Evidence suggests that online corporate brands employ a variety of partisan signals which include not only ideological positions but also more subtle, implicit appeals to partisans. Identifying and scaling a broad range of these signals in ≈2 million Twitter and Insta- gram posts from the 1,000 most popular corporate brands in the United States, I find that most corporate brands’ speech mirrors the speech of Democrats, but this is concentrated in a handful of brands and occurs in uneven bursts across time. Moreover, this communication is not as dishonest as popular narratives suggest: the majority of brands’ partisan speech well represents the political preferences of key stakeholders (e.g. employees, voters, and consumers) and is at least somewhat informative about corporate governance priorities (e.g. political spending, DEI outcomes, and cli- mate policy). These results provide a measured counterbalance to popular narratives of ‘woke capitalism’, suggesting that political speech from corporate America is, at worst, sometimes inconsistent with stakeholders and firm agendas rather than outright hypocritical.

White candidate support continues amidst explicit and implicit white identity cues

ABSTRACT To what extent are appeals to pro-white sentiment effective in American politics? Does it matter if such appeals are implicit or explicit? We investigate the degree to which white Americans are less likely to vote for candidates that use explicit appeals to white identity than they are to those who use more implicit appeals to white identity or to out-group animus. In doing so, we provide a crucial supplement to recent work on this topic, which finds that the implicit/explicit model is becoming less relevant for whites, as well as to research on the increased relevance of white in-group attitudes for white voter behavior. To examine the effect of such white identity appeals, we conduct a survey experiment with a national sample of 2746 white Americans. We find that respondents accept both explicit and implicit white identity appeals at the same rate as out-group appeal. Additionally, we see evidence that those who identify strongly as white are more likely to support candidates who engage in racial messaging. Our findings have broad implications for our evolving understanding of racial appeals in American politics, as well as the role of white identity in contemporary political discourse.

Direct Expression or Indirect Transmission? An Empirical Research on the Impacts of Explicit and Implicit Appeals in Green Advertising

Green advertising has been shown to motivate consumers to engage in green consumption behavior. However, little is known about how resource scarcity affects the efficacy of explicit and implicit appeals in green advertising. To address it, the present research investigates the differential impacts of ecological resource scarcity (vs. abundant) and personal resource scarcity (vs. abundant) on consumers’ evaluations of explicit and implicit green advertising appeals. We proposed that the relationship between resource scarcity and green advertising appeals are mediated by consumers’ perception of green products’ effectiveness. We conducted two experimental designs to examine our hypothesis. The findings show that when consumers perceive ecological resource scarcity (vs. abundant), companies that emphasize the environmental attributes of green products (e.g., explicit appeals) are more effective in conveying green messages (study 1). Conversely, when consumers experience personal resource scarcity (vs. abundant), employing the approach of green understatement (e.g., implicit appeals) to highlight the performance advantages of green products would result in favorable consequences (study 2). Furthermore, this research reveals the critical role of perceived green products’ effectiveness in improving consumers’ attitude and purchase intention (studies 1 and 2). Resource scarcity will not always decrease consumers’ pro-environmental intention. Interestingly, ecological resource scarcity and personal resource scarcity lead to opposite preferences for green advertising appeals. These findings contribute to the literature on resource scarcity in the domain of green consumption, as well as having significant practical implications for advertisers and marketers in conveying effective information for green product promotion.

Are explicit or implicit appeals more credible? The congruence effects of green advertising appeals and product category on consumers’ evaluation

Are explicit or implicit appeals more credible? The congruence effects of green advertising appeals and product category on consumers’ evaluation

Insecurity narratives and implicit emotional appeals in French competing populisms

The salience of security concerns has dramatically increased across Europe and a growing body of research converges on their acknowledgement as contributing factors to populist success. As the empirical focus of existing research is on the populist right and on negative emotionality, this paper questions to what extent the populism-(in)security nexus is indeed distinctive to the right and predominantly underpinned by fear-based appeals. By adopting a novel typology of insecurity-framing and a qualitative strategy that infers emotions from core relational themes, the paper explores the implicit emotional content of populist insecurity narratives in France, looking at campaign communication from Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The article offers three contributions. First, by mapping which emotions underpin their insecurity narratives, it illustrates how these populist actors perform ‘emotional governance’, addressing the number of ontological insecurities generally linked to populist voting. Second, it shows that not only exclusionary but also inclusionary populists engage with processes of threat framing and do so with overlapping overarching themes. Finally, it proposes a qualitative approach that captures the holistic meaning of emotions via the methodological use of core relational themes, complementing word-based analyses.

To the Question of the Verbal Realization of Appeal

The paper contains data on the peculiarities of verbal realization of the genre of appeal in texts of different (political, religious, social) orientation. The author tries to determine the main characteristics of the content of appeals - statements of inducing nature - while conducting trial and pre-trial linguistic expertise. The author demonstrates the analysis of explicit and implicit (hidden, indirect) appeals on concrete examples. Linguistic and psycholinguistic criteria necessary for identification of the abovementioned appeals are singled out by the author on the basis of analysis of expertise materials. The paper also takes into account the role of the non-verbal component of the genre of appeal in terms of its verbal representation. The analyzed classifications are just another step towards the development of a well-founded scientific position on this issue. Complex and meticulous work is still to be done in order to work out a final list of linguistic criteria for a comprehensive classification of appeals to extremist activity. The study may help to highlight certain issues that are insufficiently covered in the theory of the modern Russian language and in the practice of linguo-expertise studies. The article aims to continue the scientific discussion on these issues, which is necessary to establish clear understanding in this area. The paper argues the objective necessity of scientific research in this area which can be beneficial both theoretically and practically. The author hopes the publication material might be useful for future linguistic research or expertise.

The Fight: Discipline and Race in an Inner-City Public Charter High School

What are the disciplinary practices in which inner-city schools engage? How is order maintained or restored? Drawing on a three-year ethnographic study of a public charter school in Philadelphia, this study demonstrates the significance of understanding school discipline through a cultural lens. Beginning with a case study of a fight in the cafeteria, I describe how teachers, administrators, and students made sense of the school’s disciplinary ethos and how the disciplinary gaze that pervaded the school put invisible pressure on staff and students. Teachers and administrators in charge of discipline, who were overwhelmingly white, made implicit racial appeals regarding what practices were the most effective and fair to students who were overwhelmingly black and from single-parent, economically precarious households in urban neighborhoods.

Ethnic Neighborhoods, Implicit Racial Appeals, and Public Political Behaviors: How the Racial Environment Interacts with Campaign Appeals to Shape Behavior

Current demographic trends suggest that in less than 30 years the United States will have a majority non-white population. Previous work has shown that racial demography has real consequences on political attitudes and private voting behaviors. In this paper I find that the racial makeup of an individual’s neighborhood also affects public political behaviors. Using data from a congressional primary campaign, I examine the responses of white Republicans when asked to display the yard sign of a white Republican candidate in a primary race against a Latino Republican. I find that individuals in higher density Latino areas are more likely to be willing to post a sign. Using a field experiment run by the campaign, I show that the use of symbolic racism has the biggest influence on the behavior of whites living in high density Latino areas. Specifically, I show that racial demography changes the influence of implicit racial appeals and that implicit racial appeals are most influential in areas where whites are in the minority. These results show that racial diversity plays a significant role in the public political behaviors of white Americans and how the racial environment affects underlying behavioral motivations.

Countering Implicit Appeals: Which Strategies Work?

Some contemporary politicians try to mobilize racial attitudes by conveying implicit racial messages against their opponents—messages in which the racial reference is subtle but recognizable and which attack the opponent for alleged misdeeds. Although targeted politicians have tried a number of different strategies to respond to implicit racial appeals, little is known about the effectiveness of these strategies. Using two survey experiments, we answer the following question: Does calling the appeal “racial” work? That is, does it neutralize the negative effects on the attacked candidate? We find mixed evidence that it does. However, offering a credible justification for the attacked behavior works more consistently. We also test whether effects vary by candidate race. The results suggest that Black candidates’ rhetorical strategies are more constrained than identical White candidates’, but that White Americans are more open to credible arguments and justifications than the previous literature implies.

WORK IN MULTICULTURAL ENVIRONMENT

Communicative competence in multicultural environment includes the proper use of verbal and non-verbal expressive linguistic messages - appellative (strive for impact on the others), informative, evaluative, and self-revealing ones. The implicit appeals in the process of communication are expressed in an indirect way by means of establishment of such emotional climate that makes the other people execute the untold wish – for example, if someone looks sad, we strive to make him/her glad. The paradoxical appeals in the process of communication aim to provoke the opposite reactions to these that they announce as aiming to provoke. For example, if a child in the kindergarten does not want to eat, this child is told that the food is not for him/her and s/he must not eat it.

Can sex sell bread?

Despite the prominent use of sexual appeals in advertising, little is known about how consumers process messages that contain explicit versus implicit sexual appeals. This research presents the results of two studies that tested whether product type and individual consumer differences in sensation seeking moderated the effects of sexual appeal type. In Study 1, we conducted an experiment and found that an explicit sexual appeal was more effective in promoting a sexually related product, while an implicit sexual appeal was more effective in promoting a non-sexually related product. The above-mentioned results only held for high sensation-seeking participants, not for those who are low sensation seekers. In Study 2, we used a different manipulation of product type and replicated the results. The findings underscore how important it is for marketers to learn more about how different sexual appeals work. The findings also illuminate how practitioners can avoid negative consumer reactions to a sexual appeal. Advertising didn’t mix sex up with our daily lives. The great Marketeer in the sky did that.Barry Brooks

Beyond the Pale: White Americans' Conditional Response to the Norm of Racial Equality

Most political scientists argue that explicit racial appeals are no longer effective in contemporary American politics. According to this view, such messages are rejected because they are perceived as violating the almost universally accepted norm of racial equality. I reexamine this question with an experimental design, embedded in a nationally representative Internet survey in which respondents were randomly assigned to one of eight treatments. The race of the messenger (black or white) and the type of appeal were manipulated, depending on treatment condition. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, I argue that explicit racial appeals are not necessarily counterproductive, as black candidates who use explicit appeals generate more support among racial conservatives relative to black candidates who use implicit appeals. The results also suggest that White Americans' response to the norm of equality is contingent on the race of the messenger. That is, when the messenger is also white, respondents are more likely to reject the appeal, but when the messenger is black (with an identical message), they do not find the message offensive. Since previous research related to the implicit and explicit racial appeals has typically focused on white messengers, to date we have been unable to detect that the rejection of explicit appeals is moderated by the race of the messenger.

A Tale of Two Cues: The Impact of Subliminal and Implicit Appeals for Racialized Issue Opinion

While the bulk of the implicit priming literature relies on the use of imagery to prime stereotypical considerations (Mendelberg 2001; Valentino, Hutchings, and White 2002), rhetorical cues have also been shown to prime stereotypes subconsciously, either through the use of carefully crafted, racially charged rhetoric (Hurwitz and Peffley 1997, 2005; Peffley, Hurwitz, and Sniderman 1997; White 2007) and experimentally through the use of subliminal cues (Kam 2007; Weinberger and Westen 2008). These priming cues have not however been tested against one another, as a means of determining which has the greatest influence activating stereotypical considerations and subsequently influencing opinion. Using a 2x2, between-subjects design (with control), I test the degree to which varied stereotypical appeals influence opinion on a series of issues. The evidence from two experiments suggests that the effects of racial primes are moderated by both subjects’ accessibility of racial stereotypes as well as their racial background, providing fertile ground for future research in racial priming.

INTERNAL REASONS AND THE OUGHT-IMPLIES-CAN PRINCIPLE1

The task of this essay is to use the ought-implies-can principle (OIC) to clarify and defend Bernard Williams’ claim that all reasons are internal. On the interpretation offered here, the internalism/externalism controversy initiated by Williams is about the indexicality of normative practical reasons. The central question is this: Are all of our reasons anchored to our current beliefs and desires (as internalists claim), or might we have reasons that are in no way tied to such contingent facts about us (as externalists claim)? I will contend that although Williams provides two different arguments against externalism, only one of them can be used to effectively defeat external reasonclaims. The first argument, according to which only internal reasons can explain rational action, will be largely ignored in favor of the second argument, which appeals to OIC as a conceptual constraint on normative reasons. Although OIC cannot directly support internalism, a plausible version of it can be used to falsify external reason-claims and thereby render internalism the default theory of practical reasons. Since the distinction between “internal” and “external” reasons has itself been widely misunderstood, I devote the first section to explicating Williams’ thesis. In the second section, I discuss the conception of sound deliberation on which internalism depends. In section three, I reconstruct Williams’ central argument for internalism by recasting several examples he develops as implicit appeals to OIC. In the fourth section, I discuss the relationship between normative reasons and “ought” statements. Finally, in the fifth section I defend a relatively strong version of OIC and then explain why this version vindicates Williams’ suspicion that all external reason-claims are false.

The “Race Card” Revisited: Assessing Racial Priming in Policy Contests

In The Race Card (2001), Mendelberg finds support for her theory that implicit racial appeals, but not explicit ones, prime racial resentment in opinion formation. She argues that citizens reject explicit appeals, rendering them ineffective, because they violate widespread egalitarian norms. Mendelberg's innovative research, however, suffers from several limitations. We remedy these deficiencies using two randomized experiments with over 6,300 respondents. We confirm that individuals do tend to reject explicit appeals outright, but find that implicit appeals are no more effective than explicit ones in priming racial resentment in opinion formation. In accounting for the differences between previous research and our own, we show that education moderates both the accessibility of racial predispositions and message acceptance. This suggests that the necessary assumptions of Mendelberg's theory hold only for different and exclusive subsets of the general population.

The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality By Tali Mendelberg. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 320p. $52.50 cloth, $17.95 paper.

Tali Mendelberg's The Race Card offers a methodologically rich and convincing account of the impact of subtle race cues in contemporary American politics. Although her thesis is a controversial one, Mendelberg develops a careful and cogent argument that racial attitudes can have a substantial effect on candidate evaluations—provided that candidates craft a racial appeal that appears to be about something other than race. She argues that the success of implicit antiblack appeals, ones juxtaposing visual references to race with ostensibly nonracial verbal messages on issues such as crime or welfare, are due to four “A” factors: ambivalence about racial stereotypes, accessibility and priming, awareness of one's reliance on racial attitudes, and the ambiguity of the racial cue.

The Point Outside the World: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on Nonsense, Paradox and Religion

Much has been made of the Kierkegaardian flavour of Wittgenstein's thought on religion, both with respect to its explicit allusions to Kierkegaard and its implicit appeals. Even when significant disparities between the two are noted, there remains an important core of de facto methodological agreement between them, addressing the limits of theory and the dispelling of illusion. The categories of ‘nonsense’ and ‘paradox’ are central to Wittgenstein's therapeutic enterprise, while the categories of ‘paradox’ and the ‘absurd’ are central to much of Kierkegaard's attempt (pseudonymous and non-pseudonymous) to dispel religious illusion. Writing of how the ‘urge to thrust against the limits of language’ yields ‘nonsense’, Wittgenstein explicitly appealed to Kierkegaard: ‘Kierkegaard, too, recognized this thrust and even described it in much the same way (as a thrust against paradox)’.1 I want to consider whether Kierkegaard's category of paradox of the absurd is assimilable to Wittgenstein's view of nonsense and paradox. I shall argue that a consideration of Wittgenstein's view of paradox can highlight contrasting strands in Kierkegaard's writings on religious faith, strands which take paradox more or less strictly – in particular, it can clarify several different opinions concerning the status of religious claims. My exploration will bring to the fore some implications of the attempt to make room, in the religious employment of language, for a ‘higher understanding’ of truths which we are said to be able to grasp but cannot express.

Selection processes in living systems: role in cognitive construction and recovery from brain damage.

The most fundamental assumptions on which this paper is based are the importance of the concept of organization and the need to seek reasons for instances of organization while avoiding accidental, implicit appeals to homunculi. In the manner of Ashby, Campbell, and other general systems theorists, the concept of selection is seen as the only alternative, a way of explaining the behavior of complex systems whose properties are manifest only when their parts interact without seeking these properties, homunculi, self-contained in the parts. As every new adaptation of a living system obviously does not wait to evolve anew from a primordial substrate, we may think of these systems as having developed an internal ecology of vicarious selectors within which new adaptations can be worked out, remote from environmental exigencies. There are both logical and empirical reasons for supposing that these structures, the determinants of varied adaptive behaviors, show self-maintenance properties involving functional autonomy and spontaneous activity. In individual organisms they range from very global, motivational and emotional programs, operating mainly via elicitation of behavioral tendencies and selection by reinforcement of behaviors, to well articulated skills suited to very specific stimulus inputs. It is proposed that these considerations are relevant to the understanding of stimulus seeking, including humor, imprinting, and the similarities between perception and thinking. The phenomenon of recovery from brain damage is then discussed at some length. It is reasoned that evolution of the brain, ongoing maintenance of order in the brain, and recovery must depend on selection processes rather than on homunculi and that the concept of functional projection provides a more explicit, useful alternative to those of localization, redundancy, and distribution of function in the brain.