Why does ‘weird’ work? Two psychologists break down the Democrats’ new messaging | Opinion
That’s just weird.
Over the last few weeks, you have probably seen Democrats referring to some Republican ideas and policy proposals as “weird.” Thanks to Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor and Democratic vice presidential nominee, weird has become a central narrative in the political discourse. The news media is currently flooded with discussion of this new strategy and its success. This approach represents a shift away from Democrat’s standard fact-checking attempts.
We’ve started to refer to this strategy as “weird-checking” — like fact-checking, but checking if something is weird instead of checking if it’s true. One of the main targets of “weird-checking” has been problematic policies, attitudes and behaviors. Many of the ideas being weird-checked reflect sexist and racist content: for example, claiming that Kamala Harris only recently became a Black person and supporting the monitoring of pregnant women to prevent them from traveling for reproductive healthcare.
These types of ideas can’t be fact-checked. But they can be weird-checked.
Why might weird-checking be an effective way to reduce the acceptance of problematic attitudes and behaviors? One key reason is that it appeals to social norms. Social norms play a powerful role in whether we accept or reject an idea or action; as individuals, we look to what others support and the actions they take to inform our own attitudes and behaviors. When we see that others support an idea or behave a certain way, we’re also more likely to do those things.
Unfortunately, we often have misperceptions of what other people think. This is because our perceptions of what others believe and do are often constructed through our own experiences rather than from information about actual rates. For example, we may assess the popularity of an opinion by how familiar it feels or how many times we recall seeing it in the news or on social media. Indeed, the media is our main source of information about how popular different ideas are. We’re less likely to have access to information obtained through, say, an opinion poll.
Media is not, however, constructed to be representative of the actual distribution of beliefs and opinions that exist in the world. Instead, the news disproportionately shares extreme and uncommon views, and our social media algorithms often prioritize sensational content that grabs and maintains our engagement. This disproportionate exposure may make those attitudes and behaviors seem more common and acceptable than they actually are.
A recent survey by Data for Progress asked US voters to judge how weird they found recent claims made by members of the Republican party. Most voters found several of them — including claiming that Kamala Harris only recently became a Black person and supporting the monitoring of pregnant women to prevent them from traveling for reproductive healthcare — to be “very weird.” When left unchecked, the disproportionate and repeated coverage of these behaviors may make them especially susceptible to falsely inflated perceptions of consensus. People may not know that the majority of other people also find these claims abnormal. By weird-checking problematic beliefs like these, Democrats are helping communicate more accurate perceptions of the true state of consensus.
Weird-checking can also be used in places where fact-checking can’t. Importantly, attitudes and the acceptability of behaviors can’t be fact-checked. You can’t fact-check, for example, whether someone should support the monitoring of pregnant women to restrict their travel. But you can weird-check this view.
Why weird-checking works
Why does weird-checking work? Calling a harmful attitude or behavior weird communicates information about social norms and consensus. Extreme and minority views are often overrepresented in the media, and repeated exposure to them may make them appear to be more common and acceptable than they actually are. When these attitudes and behaviors are problematic and can lead to harm, calling them out as “weird” can be a useful way to inflate perceptions of consensus, provide information about the views of others, and orient us to more carefully consider whether the attitude or behavior is consistent with societal values and expectations. You could use other phrasing like unusual, strange, bizarre, or out-of-touch.
But weird works.