The Anxious Public: Anxiety Management and Attitudes Toward Terrorism

• In Event: The Psychology of Terrorism and International Relations

Abstract

What really drives public opinion on foreign policy? Nearly a century after Walter Lippmann, this question remains at the center of an enduring debate, whose respective extremes cast the American public as either fundamentally rational and motivated by clear preferences – or as fickle, oft-ignorant, and deeply malleable by political elites. Strikingly, both interpretations boast ample bodies of compelling empirical evidence, and decades of insightful work has yet to definitively resolve the inconsistency.

We propose that this puzzle can be critically informed by examining overlooked psychological mechanisms that underpin foreign policy opinion. Specifically, we argue that significant portions of the public engage with foreign policy issues as anxiety-management behavior – causing those issues to become focal points for managing generalized political anxiety.

To test this theory, we employ a composite assessment for generalized anxiety and tolerance of uncertainty, which in turn yields a profile of the particular cognitive defense mechanisms employed to manage that anxiety. This profile can be linked to key foreign policy attitudes – specifically, attitudes toward terrorism and the U.S. War on Terror. We then employ a simply randomized experiment to heighten political anxiety in subjects over an unrelated issue (the North Korean nuclear threat) – which we predict some subjects will manage by attenuating their fear of terrorism and support for the War on Terror.

Author

• Christopher Ray, The Ohio State University