Spinning Out of Control

From Philippe Gohier's blog in Maclean's:

Here's an interesting piece about the Queen's University computing science professor and the program he developed to detect the amount of political spin in a candidate's message. (An electronic bullshit detector, in other words.) Skillicorn looked at the ongoing presidential campaign and posted his findings at his website.

I'm not sure any of this is all that surprising, but here's a quick rundown anyway:

John McCain comes across as the straightest-shooter of them all. Only McCain's speech to the Americans For Prosperity Michigan Summit last January was heavy on the rhetoric. Otherwise, McCain has been remarkably adept at avoiding spin.

Hillary Clinton ranks second on Skillicorn's straight-talk meter, with only a handful of speeches garnering a negative score. (Higher scores mean less spin.)

Barack Obama is dead last, with the vast majority of his speeches sounding all kinds of alarms. Although Skillicorn writes Obama has recently "changed his word usage in a major way" (read: less spin-ful), the professor also notes it's "unlikely that he has done this consciously." Instead, Obama may have simply become convinced he can't lose - and has perhaps started believing his own spin as a result.

Skillicorn says about his study:

McCain tends to score well because he uses the pronoun "I" heavily. In contrast, Obama tends to use "we", and this pronoun plays a much more complicated role in communication. For example, in two-person interactions, the lower-status person tends to use more first-person singular pronouns, so using "I" creates an impression of humility (which is not what people intuitively think). In contrast, while female use of "we" does seem to signal inclusiveness, male use of "we" is often used to soften an imperative, and so tends not to come across as inclusive.