Feeling is Believing? How emotions influence the effectiveness of political fact-checking messages
Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: Political misperceptions are a complex problem for scholars, journalists, and politicians. Despite ubiquitous fact-checking and corrective messages online and in the media, polls show citizens are consistently misinformed about a variety of political issues. To date, most explanations for the failure of these messages to correct false beliefs have centered only on partisan-based information processing strategies, which suggest citizens are more likely to believe a claim that reflects well on their preferred party while rejecting those that reflect poorly. However, I argue there are several reasons to suspect this approach by itself is insufficient for explaining and predicting why and how fact-checking messages often fail. In this dissertation I build on affective intelligence theory and propose a theoretical model that outlines how citizens’ unique emotional states interact with their party affiliation to influence belief in political misperceptions. I argue the experience of two discrete emotions of the same valence, anxiety and anger, can have dramatically different effects on citizens’ beliefs about politics by determining whether they consider misinformation in either a partisan or more deliberative fashion. The unique influence of anxiety and anger is tested in two experimental studies that manipulate emotional states and show how these discrete emotions come to have contrasting effects on people’s beliefs about contemporary political issues. Study 1 tests whether emotions unrelated to the target of the misperception can influence belief, while
Author: Brian E. Weeks
Institution: The Ohio State University
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2253598122