What Makes Us Hot? The Physiological Underpinnings of Political Attitudes

• In Event: The Biological Dynamics of Political Attitudes and Their Measurement

Abstract

Emotions have shown to be vital in political decision making. We, however, put forward that is unlikely that all issues are emotionally charged. We develop a new theory of the emotional underpinnings of political issues. In this pre-registered study, we test the expectation that issues become hot once they are connected to the evolutionary relevant frame. Specifically, if an issue is connected to an evolutionary relevant frame there is a stronger effect of the frame on the expressed policy position and the emotional responses should mediate the effect of the frame on the policy position. Some issues have been considered “technical”, such as economic issues. We theorize that technical issues become hot-button issues once the issue is connected to evolutionary relevant frames. Finally, we hypothesize that competing evolutionary relevant frames increase the emotional response to the issue. We test this using a series of framing experiments. Participants in a large laboratory study (N=202) were randomly exposed to differently framed messages. The messages were shown on a screen and they heard the message – recorded by a speech actor – through the headphones. During exposure to the message we measured arousal and valence of the emotional responses using physiological measures. At APSA we will present the results of this pre-registered study.

Authors

• Bert Bakker, University of Amsterdam

• Kevin Arceneaux, Temple University