Motivating Change: Affect, Not Emotion

• In Event: Partisanship, Affect, and Polarization

Abstract

Much of political psychology assumes that emotions motivate action. Based on this assumption, political psychologists design studies to generate and measure emotion, and record its impact on behavior. However, countless studies find this link tenuous: treatments routinely generate emotion, but emotion rarely maps cleanly onto post-treatment attitudes and behavior. We argue that this is because affect, not emotion, motivates behavior.

Using the insights from theories of “affective intelligence” and “motivated reasoning” as our starting point, we present a new ‘theory of mind’ based on recent advances in neuroscience and psychology. Our theory makes three claims: 1) Past memory concepts construct present “reality,” 2) Affect, not emotion, motivates verdicts (behavior), and 3) Hung juries don’t deliver (immediate) verdicts. The theory highlights the multi-dimensional nature of affect and maps these dimensions onto behavior, explaining along the way why self-reported emotional states are more akin to post-hoc self-reported attitudes than they are to the internal affective states we argue motivate behavior.

We present results from two large survey experimental studies (2606 and 3092 participants, respectively) conducted with nationally-diverse samples from throughout the United Kingdom. In each, we randomly assign participants to competing messages designed to impact policy attitudes towards the recent influx of immigrants and refugees to the country. We show that we find the same puzzle as other scholars: we can generate high levels of empathy, but the treatments have little effect on post-treatment attitudes. However, when we instead measure affect, including a newly conceptualized measure of “dissonance,” we find strong and consistent effects that match the predictions of the theory. We conclude the paper with a discussion of the implications of our findings, with particular focus on their import for those studying persuasion or interested in motivating change.

Authors

• Joshua Ronald Gubler, Brigham Young University

• Christopher F. Karpowitz, Brigham Young University