{"id":52874,"date":"2012-12-05T17:39:06","date_gmt":"2012-12-05T22:39:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=52874"},"modified":"2012-12-05T17:39:06","modified_gmt":"2012-12-05T22:39:06","slug":"what-happened-to-the-oldsmobile","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2012\/12\/05\/what-happened-to-the-oldsmobile\/","title":{"rendered":"What Happened to the Oldsmobile?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at Montclair Socioblog<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Try not to think about an Oldsmobile.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been thinking about Oldsmobile.\u00a0 I mentioned it in passing in\u00a0the previous post<\/a>, and since then I\u2019ve been wondering about \u201cNot Your Father\u2019s Oldsmobile\u201d \u2013 the brand\u2019s swan song.\u00a0 Matthew Yglesias at\u00a0Slate<\/a>\u00a0thinks that the campaign alienated the regular customers, the ones who bought a new Olds every few years, saying to them in effect, \u201cYou\u2019re a geezer, an Oldster, and have been for a while \u2013 sans youth, sans sex, sans taste, sans everything except your crummy car.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The tag that completed the famous set-up line was, \u201cThe new generation of Olds.\u201d<\/p>\n

The target of the campaign was to attract young car buyers, but it missed badly.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 My guess is the futility of negation.\u00a0 Saying what something is\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0doesn\u2019t give people a clear picture of what that something actually\u00a0is<\/em>.\u00a0 But that\u2019s not the problem here.\u00a0 The message was clear, especially with that tag about generations.<\/p>\n

The problem is that direct negation can reinforce the idea you are trying to deny \u2013 as in the paradoxical command to not think about an elephant. \u201cI am not a crook,\u201d said Richard Nixon in his televised address about Watergate.\u00a0 It\u2019s his most remembered line, and when he spoke it, the TV screen might as well have had an overlay flashing the words \u201cGame Over.\u201d<\/p>\n

If the denial contradicts general perceptions (i.e., the brand), people might not hear it at all, or worse, they might hear the opposite.\u00a0 Ever since fact-checking went public in a big way a few years ago, we\u2019ve seen corrections to the lies that politicians have told about one another.\u00a0 But as\u00a0Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler have shown<\/a>, corrections can boomerang, especially when they clash with ideas the reader already has.<\/p>\n

Can these false or unsubstantiated beliefs about politics be corrected? … Results indicate that corrections frequently fail to reduce misperceptions among the targeted ideological group. We also document several instances of a \u201cbackfire effect\u201d in which corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group in question.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

By insisting that they weren’t old after all, Oldsmobile might have done more harm than good.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/p>\n

Jay Livingston is\u00a0the\u00a0chair of the Sociology Department at\u00a0Montclair State University<\/a>. \u00a0You can follow him at\u00a0Montclair SocioBlog<\/a>\u00a0or on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at Montclair Socioblog. Try not to think about an Oldsmobile. I\u2019ve been thinking about Oldsmobile.\u00a0 I mentioned it in passing in\u00a0the previous post, and since then I\u2019ve been wondering about \u201cNot Your Father\u2019s Oldsmobile\u201d \u2013 the brand\u2019s swan song.\u00a0 Matthew Yglesias at\u00a0Slate\u00a0thinks that the campaign alienated the regular customers, the ones who bought a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":258,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[253,221,675,23705],"class_list":["post-52874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-history","tag-cars","tag-psychology","tag-vintage-stuff"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/258"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52874"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52874\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52877,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52874\/revisions\/52877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}