The Influence of Parodies on Mental Models: Exploring the Tina Fey-Sarah Palin Phenomenon

Abstract

During the 2008 presidential campaign season, Tina Fey’s timely impersonations of Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live attracted overwhelming attention, both on NBC and online. In the weeks of September and October 2008, press buzzed about a possible “Fey Effect”: a negative impact of Fey’s impersonations on Palin’s favorability ratings and a subsequent decline in the GOP ticket (Sands, 2008). The current study seeks to test for a possible “Fey Effect” by measuring if Fey’s impersonations of Palin rendered caricatured traits more salient in viewers’ mental constructions of the candidate, namely character traits central to the Fey impersonation, including issues of intelligence, competence, experience and the Governor’s rural background. Rooting the analysis in cognitive psychology, associative network models of knowledge storage and retrieval, and priming effects, we explore whether or not the SNL parodies may have encouraged viewers to help form perceptions of a relatively unknown candidate by increasing the salience of certain aspects of her personality and background.

Using a pre-post three conditions between-subjects design and a sample of 255 undergraduates at a large Eastern university, we employed online surveys and streaming video to assess whether or not exposure to the Fey impersonations rendered caricatured traits more salient in participants’ open-ended evaluations of Palin. Participants first completed a questionnaire, and two weeks later were sent a link to view either 1) a segment of an original CBS interview between Katie Couric and Sarah Palin, 2) the SNL parody of that interview, or 3) a travel video as a control group stimulus. Findings indicate that exposure to both the original interview and its parody increased the salience of Palin’s intelligence, competence and experience in their open-ended evaluations of her, compared to the control group. In addition, results indicate that, among participants who viewed the SNL parody, traits associated with Palin’s rural background were more salient than in the control group, a finding not found as a result of exposure to the original interview. The lack of significant differences in outcomes between the original CBS interview and the SNL parody give pause to those who blamed Palin’s declining favorability on a “Fey Effect.” Ultimately, this research finds that at least part of the agency of influence rests in the Palin herself, leading us to conclude that perhaps the underlying trend would be more accurately described as a “Palin Effect.”