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.

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.