Emotion and Political Information Seeking

Does strong affect (emotion) influence political information seeking? Yes, according to a study in the journal Political Psychology. But in mixed ways.

Several emotions appeared to increase campaign interest, with anxious, angry, and enthusiastic subjects saying they were more interested in the presidential race and would pay more attention as compared to those in a control group. Okay. Makes sense. And now the BUT of the study. "However, all three emotional states led subjects to take less time looking for information that was made available to them."

In other words, manipulating emotion led to them saying they'd seek out more info, but in reality they didn't.

A second experiment by Valentino and his colleagues gets at one point I'd like to discuss briefly, that anger did not "enhance the quantity or quality of information seeking" nor did it aid in learning.

Think about this in terms of TV and radio shows hosted by people who do little more than generate anger toward "the other side" in a debate. That emotional response, these experiments suggest, leads to no additional information seeking. In other words -- pissed off people don't look for more info on a topic. That's bad. That's bad for democracy, that's bad for news, that's bad for the people who let themselves get angry and it's bad that hosts use anger as a tool and play a role in getting people to not seek out additional information.

Affect

In what people know, sometimes what they know is how a candidate or public figure makes them feel. Emotion, or affect as it's called in social psychology, is an important part of how we process information.

The American National Election Studies have long asked a series of Affect questions about the major candidates. In other words, how a candidate made you feel. The affective responses are angry, hopeful, afraid, and proud.

What got me thinking of these was a graph in the latest copy of a book called Social Cognition that described a two-factor solution for the structure of Affect. I won't try to draw it here, but think of two intersecting lines. At the top is Strong Engagement and at the bottom is Disengagement. From left to right is Pleasantness and Unpleasantness. Then they put all these cool affective tags.

At the very top, in Strong Engagement, is "aroused" and "astonished" while at the bottom the Disengagement is "quiet" and "still." Okay, fine. At the far left in Pleasant is "content" and "satisfied" and a lot of others, and at the far right is "grouchy" and "sad" and the like. The fun is when you get high in one and low in the other, or some other combination. You'll find "enthusiastic" in the Strong Engagement and Pleasant quadrant, for example, or "hostile" when engagement is high but Unpleasantness has kicked in.

So look at the four ANES affective responses. Where do they fit? Best I can tell, all fall in the top half of the two-factor solution, where positive or negative affect come into play with Strong Engagement. In other words, the ANES affective responses fail to measure Disengagement that one may feel in relation to a presidential candidate.

That kinda makes sense, that you're trying to measure engaged affect, but I suspect we're also missing a lot here, a sense of alienation in affective response. If a candidate makes you feel relaxed or calm, we don't really get that, unless of course you count the opposite or low scores on the other affective tags. I'm not sure it works well, trying that.

What's this to do with media and political knowledge? A great deal given how affect and cognition can relate to one another, and the media play a significant role in not only what people know, but also how they feel.

What We Know -- From Hate Email

We all get them, those bogus viral hate emails spreading doom and gloom about a political candidate (most often, it seems, Obama).

But do they work? Kinda.

An article written about some research conducted on the subject reports:

Their preliminary findings: Voter-choice was not altered by exposure to the email, either firsthand or secondhand. Yet, still Obama's "feeling thermometer scores'' dropped in the condition where subjects read the email, and the temperature for him rose in conditions where they read a rebuttal from Obama's Web-site.

I can't find the original research and I should point out that it's not been peer reviewed, so there's no way to judge the methodology, but on the surface it seems sound -- and interesting. To continue, quoting the authors:

"Our results suggest that these types of personal candidate attacks can have an affect on citizen preferences,'' Professors Phillip Hardy and Mary Walsh write in a draft of their report graciously shared with the Tribune. "The preliminary findings from our study point to (1) decreased feeling thermometer scores toward the target candidate; (2) a diminished sense of empathy and morality associated with him; and (3) fear of Obama's religious background.

The bad news is they do seem to work, at least at a vague, hard-to-define, attitudinal/affective level. Not only is that enough to get you publication, if statistical analysis holds up, but it's damned important too.

It's scary to imagine these things actually working, but apparently they do inside the head, under the hood. Whether they translate into behavior, like voting, that's always tougher to find in any kind of research. I suppose next Tuesday will be the ultimate test.

The Power of Optimism

Never underestimate the political power of making people feel optimistic. "It's morning in America," was a great slogan, and when times are tough it is vital a candidate make people feel good about themselves, about their country. In the world of what people know, if you can come across as the one hopeful, you have an advantage.

Thus, Obama.

Want numbers? I got your numbers. A new ABC News/Washington Post poll asked respondents: "Regardless of who you may support, who do you think is more optimistic?"

• McCain 30 percent
• Obama 62 percent

Ouch, if you're a McCain supporter. Knowing nods if you favor Obama.

Affect is as important as cognition, emotion as much a part of what people know as is breaking down issues and policy stances and projections of what a candidate may do, who that candidate used to pal around with, and all the rest. How a candidate makes us feel, that matters. Reagan did this so well. Clinton too. Obama has that same magic, at least according to the numbers and any objective view of his campaign stump speeches and his debate performances.

But the McCain folks ain't out of this yet. I think their "spread the wealth" socialism tack has some traction. It's a neat line aimed at Obama: "if the beret fits, wear it." Whether they can do enough with that in the next couple of weeks seems unlikely, but if Obama has hit some kind of ceiling effect in certain key states, they may stand a chance of making this closer than it appears.

Knowledge vs Emotion

In social science PhDweebdom, we call emotion "affect" just to confuse budding grammarians who struggle with the difference between effect and affect. The relationships between cognition (stuff you know), affect (stuff you feel) and motivation (what moves ya to do something) are complex, baffling, and altogether enough to drive one crazy.

So, why bother?

In my continuing saga of studies I'd like to see, I would love to know what people "know" about Obama versus what they "feel" about him, and which better predicts support. I have no partisan issue here, but I suspect affect plays a bigger role in support than does cognition. I'm not suggesting Obama supporters don't think, I'm just wondering whether emotion is a key factor, overwhelming cognition. I suspect it is.

In general, other than party identification, key factors in who you vote for at the presidential level are competence and integrity. Some lean one way, some lean the other. And individual elections can frame the race around one versus the other. A good example is 1976 and Jimmy Carter, a post-Watergate election in which integrity became the main factor. How people decide these two is a fascinating issue, and it's my non-scholarly sense that Democrats seem to lean more on competence and Republicans seem to lean more on integrity -- but that's more of a gut feeling than one based on hard data.

A fun test would be asking Democrats where they stand on issues, using the NES traditional 7-point scale, and then asking them to place Obama and Clinton on the same scale, and see where they fall. There's a neat web site that kinda does this, asking you a lot of issue questions and then telling you who you should support, the candidate most fitting your stance.

Didn't work at all for me, at least at the moment. Clearly I'm not cognitive.