The power of the underdog-effect & misinformation

Positioning a set of beliefs or knowledge as the suppressed underdog is a widely used strategy that has powerful effects

In misinformation wars it is not uncommon for people to adopt an underdog status, claiming that the beliefs and the facts they hold are being threatened by powerful forces.  Look at the way in which Trump, himself a billionaire, complains of being the victim of ‘Liberal elites’.  But also in other spheres such as wellness, those holding minority beliefs and challenging widely accepted scientific perspectives will often claim that their perspectives are being closed down by authorities. 

It might seem that strange that if you are hoping your claims to have influence, you would suggest you are the weaker party.  But on the contrary, this week we are exploring how the act of holding an ‘underdog’ set of beliefs can offer considerable impact.

The ‘underdog-effect’ is often used in a harmless manner but can also have negative consequences.  In drawing on different examples we will tease out what the mechanisms are, but in no way are we making judgements or inferences about the subject matter or the manner in which these strategies have been deployed.

New age and opposition to establishment beliefs

 We start off by looking at an area that has long had an underdog status, that of New Age beliefs, based around the notion of the spiritual authority of the self.  This area, according to Egil Asprem, has a huge range of different belief systems that lack an overarching institutionalized orthodoxy . This means people are able to move freely and quickly through what can, at first glance, appear to be distinct beliefs and practices.

Asprem writes about the long history of the way that ‘illegitimacy’ of certain beliefs offers them influence.  He suggests that the ‘cultic milieu’, the range of belief systems relating to mystical, occult and other spiritual practices, have for centuries been considered as knowledge which is ‘rejected’, ‘supressed’ and ‘stigmatized’ by those in ‘authority’.

The point, for our purposes, is that despite their lack of positively shared belief systems, they appear united and are actually given impetus through their shared opposition to ‘Establishment’ beliefs.

Brands and the underdog strategy

We can cast further light on this by switching context and looking at the way in which brands have long used an ‘underdog’ strategy to gain market share – through their opposition to a dominant competitor or type of offer.  Indeed, numerous anecdotal examples abound of brands that began as underdogs and became successful. These include the struggle of Avis against market leader Hertz in the sixties, Pepsi’s challenging of Coca-Cola in the seventies and eighties and Apple’s iconic rise to dominance in the nineties. 

Neeru Paharia and colleagues set out the way that marketers do not rely necessarily rely on consumers to infer their brands’ underdog status, but instead author their own underdog narratives.  These ‘brand biographies’ typically tell stories about the entrepreneurs (apparently) humble origins, struggling against the odds to build their businesses through hard graft and determination, despite lacking the resources of their monied competitors.

Holger J. Schmidt and Pieter Steenkamp built on this creating an ‘underdog brand management framework’. They illustrated this with an account of the way Apple’s successfully deployed this strategy, with their 1984 advertisement being a classic example. Of course, this is not limited to start-up brands – large and successful brands like Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft have at various points also adopted an underdog role, profiling ‘the humble garages in which they began’.

We are not for a moment suggesting that any brand deploying an underdog positioning is de-facto involved in misinformation – but this does allow us to see more clearly how this mechanism can be used to shape outcomes and energise people.

Underdog and social policy

Another interesting application of this strategy is from research by Christopher Bryan and colleagues where activating adolescent values was used as a way to fuel healthier eating behaviours. In their study, they created materials that reflected adolescent values of being socially conscious and autonomous through healthy eating, with messaging that challenged dominant companies which focused on the marketing of unhealthy snacks to the young and the less well off.

Positioning healthy eating as a defiant, underdog activity that bolstered adolescents’ autonomy and social justice, increasing the motivation to eat healthier foods and resulted in changing the behaviour of study participants.

Conspiracy theories

An important additional connection to make is the relationship between this underdog positioning and conspiracy theories. To examine this, we can return to New Age and other non-orthodox beliefs. Asprem points out how it is not difficult to see the way that conspiracy theories provide a common language in the face of ‘stigmatized knowledge claims’.  Conspiracy theorists suggest that if certain types of knowledge or beliefs are stigmatised, then there is a logic to identifying the way in which institutions that have conventionally been considered as the arbiters between ‘knowledge and error’ can be readily be considered to be ‘suppressing knowledge’. 

Indeed, conspiracy theorist Michael Barkun suggests that if people consider that their own ideas about knowledge are in conflict with orthodox notions, then it can be all to position the ‘forces of orthodoxy’ as seeking to challenge, vilify and delegitimize either out of self-interest or some other negative motive.

Hence, we can see the way in which perceptions of stigmatized knowledge can be closely related to conspiratorial thinking. This has also been highlighted by researchers Charlotte Ward and David Voas who identified this linkage between New Age spirituality and conspiracy thinking, describing it as ‘Conspirituality’.

Here is to the misfits

When we start looking at this issue, it was startling to see just how much the underdog mechanism is a hugely powerful part of Western culture. Indeed Joseph Campbell identified the underdog as a classic storyline (the Hero’s Journey) which is deeply embedded in many different films, creating feelings of empathy and hope as well as resentment and anger. 

Returning to Apple, have a read of the text to another of their adverts:

“Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes ... the ones who see things differently -- they're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. ... You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things. ... They push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the people who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

It is easy to see the power of this positioning and the way in which adopting this underdog positioning can also set things up in opposition, creating a sense of need for widespread, fundamental change and perhaps even reflects a sense of resentment or defensiveness at the way in which one’s ‘underdog beliefs’ might be stigmatized or ridiculed. 

With this in mind, it may well be hard to engage or even influence the mindsets of people who have adopted this position.  Indeed, encountering ridicule and disbelief can very much be the expectation, reinforcing the narrative related to negative ‘forces of orthodoxy’.

Conclusions

It is surely quite confusing when groups that hold power identify themselves as the underdogs.  This is particularly the case in the political sphere, when politicians appear to show themselves as the victims, rather than operating from authority.  This can seem nonsensical as we might argue it undermines their authority. 

But by unpacking this ‘underdog-effect’ we can see the way in which it taps into a hugely powerful cultural narratives that can powerfully influence our response.  The underdog-effect may not always be deployed consciously and explicitly, but it is such an integral part of our cultural narrative that we may find it hard to see it clearly.

Nevertheless, this effect seems to be deployed in a wide variety of contexts: from teenagers eating vegetables, and brands using it as a means to encourage a devoted following, to politicians using it to shape sentiment on key policy areas and generate votes. 

Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out the way its use (knowingly or otherwise) has the potential to create hard-to-reconcile difference and binary oppositions.  People are often fully prepared to be seen as ‘crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers’, and while there is nothing wrong in this, there is a danger that the rhetoric of the positions held can drown out engagement and discussion between the positions.

This is important as we have talked about the value and power of public dialogue to tackle misinformation:  if we can identify when an underdog position is being taken and recognise the rhetorical impact that it has, then we can more easily find ways to mitigate impact on dialogue. 

The underdog effect is of course not the only mechanism that shapes misinformation, but we believe that it is a very important one that needs further focus and attention.