Attack Messages and the Moderating Role of Individual Differences

• In Event: This Note's For You: Campaign Advertising Effects and Affordances

Abstract

Whether negative campaigning messages have a net positive effect is still disputed, as the backlash against the sponsor frequently outweigh the harm done to the target. Recent evidence suggests that individual differences are likely to play a role, and that some citizens seem - because of who they are - more tolerant to attack politics. For instance, evidence exists that voters scoring low in agreeableness tend to be more easily seduced by negative campaigns. This new strand of research is however still at an early stage, and it is yet unclear which sets of individual differences - is it personality? Attitudes towards politics? Something else entirely? - is more likely to matter. Furthermore, the extent to which these individual differences matter similarly for different types of attack politics is still unknown. Indeed, no systematic test of competing dynamics exists yet, to the best of our knowledge. Our article relies on novel data from an online experiment with US citizens (MTurk, December 2019, N=884) and tests for the moderating role of individual differences on the effectiveness of negative campaigning messages. In a factorial experiment, respondents were exposed to mock newspaper articles containing attack messages framed as a combination of a negative tone, incivility, fear appeals, and populist appeals. Between-subjects models test for the moderating role of three sets of individual differences: personality traits (Big Five, Dark Triad), conflict avoidance, and tolerance for negativity. Results show that, as expected, some respondents are more inclined to appreciate attack politics; for them, not only negativity does not backlash, but even increases support for the sponsor of the attacks.

Authors

• Alessandro Nai, University of Amsterdam

• Juergen Maier, University of Koblenz-Landau