Social Desirability Bias in Three Speeches

I just rewatched Election for the first time in twenty years, and it was even better than I remembered.  And this time around, I had better conceptual tools to understand it.  Most notably, the movie features three election speeches that elegantly exemplify Social Desirability Bias – and its absence.

First, the front-runner, Tracy Flick, delivers a classic firehose of SDB:

Poet Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “I cannot make my days longer, so I strive to make them better.”

With this election, we...