Does my Favorite Political TV Series Make Me Cynical? Introducing a New Cause of Political Cynicism

The main goal of the project will be to discover a new variable that influences political cynicism. The popularity of the political TV series and the growing number of people watching them made us believe it would be interesting to explore the subject and see if these series are sending subliminal messages to their audiences. If the assumption proves to be true, we can demonstrate how political TV series can create or reinforce the cynicism of people watching them, finding an additional factor in explaining cynicism. We will design a classical experiment where two different groups will be exposed to treatments in order to see if we find a positive relation between watching House of Cards and cynicism. One group will be exposed to the first episode of House Of Cards (being exposed to the first episode and not a random one or a mix of the most cynical scenes from different seasons will make it more clear and easy to watch and follow for the group). The second group is going to be the control group that will be watching most probably a Discovery Documentary, nothing related to politics (real or fictional). We have chosen House of Cards, for practical reasons, as the general opinion considers it the most cynical of all the political series that are aired right now. (http://www.thenation.com/article/very-american-cynicism-house-cards/) As characteristics for the groups we have two main requirements: they need to be large enough to provide significant and reliable results (around 100 persons) and the individuals to have never seen House of Cards, so we can measure their initial impact and attitude towards it. We will most probably recruit our subjects from the students at University of Montreal. A before and after questionnaire will be applied in order to measure their initial and final levels of cynicism. The experiment takes place in a lab, where we will display the episode/ documentary. All the participants will see it at the same time and they will complete the questionnaires in the same place. This method brings us some advantages: first we can control for the exposure and make sure they all watch the episode ( which would be more difficult for an online experiment), secondly they all watch it at the same time, but without the risk of contagion. Watching their assigned episode almost as in a movie theatre, but without disturbing factors around them (family of friends that would comment, snacks, having the option to pause it as many times as they want it if they watch it on their computers), might play in our favor and make them more attentive to the details and cues in the scenes. We are considering the option of applying another questionnaire after a period of time (2, 3 weeks later) in order to account for the durability of the effects through a panel survey (in case our results show a link between cynicism and the series, we can see if they are short-termed or long-termed).