Lawmakers frequently propose bills named after victims of tragic events to garner public support and commemorate those who died. A recent study assesses whether reading these personal stories leads voters to support bills they might otherwise have doubts about. This result shows that attaching victims’ stories to bills reliably increases voter support. This particular study was recently published in Psychology, Public Policy, and Law.
Naming laws after individuals is a common practice in American politics at both the state and federal levels. National registries and local safety mandates are often proposed in response to highly publicized tragedies. Legal scholars have long expressed concerns about this practice. Critics of these policies worry that emotionally charged stories are encouraging lawmakers and voters to support ineffective or poorly written rules just to avoid appearing insensitive. Critics sometimes refer to this process as legislation by anecdote and argue that it diverts resources away from proven solutions.
Chrystia Reed, a psychology researcher at the University of Texas at El Paso, led a research team that investigated the psychological mechanisms behind this. They wanted to know whether victims’ names and victims’ stories would actually move the public to support the bill. They also tested whether emotions such as sympathy or negative perceptions of the offender influenced those decisions.
The research team based their physical experiments on sociological concepts that explore policies enacted to alleviate public panic. These laws often do not realistically reduce crime or improve safety. Scholars have suggested that such legislation relies heavily on mythical narratives that feature easily identifiable villains and highly sympathetic victims.
Humans generally want to help a specific, identifiable victim rather than an invisible mass of people. Psychologists call this the “identifiable victim effect.” This phenomenon suggests that stories create context and relevance, making information highly memorable and persuasive. Vivid stories about people who are suffering attract far more attention and evoke empathy than abstract statistics.
For the first experiment, the researchers recruited 112 college students and presented them with the text of an actual legislative proposal. This bill aims to limit the use of solitary confinement in juvenile detention facilities. Half of the participants read the basic legal text explaining the proposed regulation. The other half read the same text with an additional story about a teenager named Rosemary.
In the context of the story, it was explained in the text that Rosemary died by suicide after spending six weeks in solitary confinement. Her story included details of her history of depression and a statement from her family wishing the tragedy had been avoided. The researchers designed this provision based on the events that inspired the actual state law.
The results revealed significant differences in voting behavior depending on the presentation format. All participants who read Rosemary’s story voted to support the bill. In contrast, only about three-quarters of the group reading the standard legal text approved of the measure.
The difference was not just in changing the final vote count. The researchers noted that personal stories helped subjects make sense of confusing legal terminology. Some members of the control group opposed the bill because they mistakenly believed it would promote solitary confinement, a practice they dislike. None of the participants who read the victim’s narrative exhibited this underlying confusion.
The research design was repeated to see if these patterns held true for community members and different types of laws. In the second experiment, 194 adults selected from a national online participant pool read aloud a bill that would require drug and alcohol monitoring devices for people on parole. One group received only the plain text of the proposal. The experimental group read additional text explaining that the bill was inspired by a teenager killed in a crash caused by a drunk driver.
The story version once again received much higher approval ratings. Nearly 80% of readers who saw victim stories supported mandatory surveillance. In the group without a story, support remained at around 60%.
In this second phase, participants also completed a questionnaire designed to measure their emotional state and existing political attitudes. Participants indicated how strict they believed current laws were and how much they valued bodily autonomy. People were generally less supportive of policies if they strongly believed in bodily autonomy or felt that current laws were already too strict. But even when the researchers factored in these pre-existing beliefs, the story still managed to boost support.
Statistical models show that this increased empathy directly bridges the gap between reading an article and voting in favor of a bill. The researchers initially suspected that the stories would lead participants to view parolees in a less human light. The data proved this theory wrong, as the story did not change how respondents viewed the criminal’s humanity.
In the first two experiments, we combined the victim’s name and the victim’s story into one package. To determine which specific factors were most important, Reed and her team designed a third experiment with 365 undergraduate students. They separated the variables, giving some participants only the name of the bill, some only the description, and others either both variables or neither variable.
Researchers have found that the story itself is primarily what changes minds. Including the victim’s story significantly increased support compared to reading the bill without the story. Simply adding the name to the front of the proposal led to a small increase in support on an incremental scale.
However, these small differences related to name changes were not statistically significant on our primary measurement tool. This experiment shows that humans rely on narrative structure to process information and make decisions. People feel more motivated to take action when provided with detailed stories about someone’s life. In this context, that motivation translates into voting in favor of a particular law.
The researchers noted some limitations to their conclusions. The bills selected for academic study enjoyed relatively high baseline support, even without victim narratives attached. Testing highly controversial or strictly partisan policies may yield different results because deep political beliefs can override emotional appeals. This experimental setting also meant that participants did not face the real-world consequences of enacting bad policies or spending taxpayer money on ineffective measures.
Future research could examine whether certain types of victims garner more sympathy than others in the context of policy making. Some academic commentators have noted that media coverage disproportionately focuses on young and traditionally attractive victims. Testing demographic variables could reveal whether narrative effects apply equally to all populations, or whether inherent biases shape who receives memorial laws in the first place.
It would also be helpful to delve deeper into how the framework of information affects understanding. Initial research shows that stories can help voters better understand complex legal texts, so this practice may have legitimate educational benefits. Determining how to provide useful context without unduly imposing raw emotion on voters remains a challenge for legislators.
The study, “The Power of Victim Stories: Homonymous Legislation Increases Voter Sympathy and Support,” was authored by Chrystia Reed, Grace Hanselin, Rubi M. Gonzalez, and Melanie B. Fessinger.
