An Upside to Sadness? Sadness' Role in Reconsidering Attitudes toward Policing

• In Event: The Power of Emotions

Abstract

While individuals tend to dislike the feeling of sadness, can sadness motivate people to be better citizens? More specifically, can sadness have positive consequences in the context of the criminal justice system? Over the past ten years, U.S. citizens’ calls for criminal justice and police reform have increased in frequency and intensity in the wake of high-profile police brutality cases. Notably, Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd in 2020 elicited protests and outcries from millions of people. In this project, I argue that sadness is a critical mechanism in changing attitudes and behaviors to support the individual(s) they perceive as being harmed by the criminal justice system. Ultimately, sadness may serve as a powerful emotion that drives citizens to take action and create meaningful change for a more equitable world.

The project makes three contributions. First, the study examines how the specific emotion of sadness can promote changes in policy preferences and prosocial behaviors, particularly in the area of policing. Previous research highlights how emotions like anger, enthusiasm, and anxiety influence information processing (Webster, 2020, Marcus et al., 2019; Albertson & Gadarian, 2015), but sadness is a unique emotion that decreases both information processing bias and heuristics (Yang, 2019). As a result, feelings of sadness can motivate actors to engage in situation-changing behavior (Roseman et al., 1994) in order to cope with the discomfort of sadness. To the extent that individuals feel sad about policing, they are more likely to think about the issue more deeply, reconsider their policy preferences, and support changes to policing to prevent recurrence.

Second, the project identifies both (1) how race moderates different levels of sadness that individuals experience, and (2) how similar levels of sadness for white and Black respondents can result in different political behaviors. Group level differences, like race, are often disregarded in political psychology or only included as control variables (Albertson, 2020). This project identifies how race for Black and white people moderates their emotional reactions about police violence. Additionally, given the blocked sampling design, I can identify differences in white and Black respondents’ sadness across treatment conditions to further identify different shifts across outcomes like information processing, policy preferences, and prosocial support for actors like the police or shooting victim.

Third, the project focuses on a salient issue that has garnered national attention and generated feelings of sadness among the public. Police are more likely to stop people of color and brutally injure or kill them (Sinyangwe, Mckesson, & Elzie, 2021; Edwards, Lee, & Eposito, 2019; Nix et al., 2019). Public opinion polls reflect widespread sadness around policing: in particular, Eichstaedt et al. (2021) find that 47.3% of Black Americans and 37.7% of white Americans reported feelings of sadness after the passing of George Floyd. This project examines how emotional reactions, especially sadness, can result in deeper thinking about policing in the United States and shift policy preferences to support policing reforms.

I use a cross-sectional survey experiment on Qualtrics with blocked sampling of White and Black respondents with random assignment to one of three conditions: (1) a fictional news story about a Black or (2) White teenager being killed by police, or (3) a control condition. After reading the fictional article, participants are asked the outcome variables of the study: emotional reactions to the story, prosocial support to the victim of the story, and policing policy preferences.

Then, I test three hypotheses:
(1) Race moderates the emotional frequency and intensity of sadness participants feel after learning about a police shooting. As a result, Black people will experience more sadness and anger about the news story in comparison to White people.
(2) Sadness increases prosocial behavior to assist the party perceived as harmed. Consequently, sad individuals are more likely to support the victim by donating greater amounts of money in a fictional donation scenario.
(3) Sadness increases shifts in policy preferences for reforms in police training. Thus, higher levels of sadness increase the likelihood of supporting policy reforms to policing.

In the end, sadness—relative to other negative emotions—is more likely to promote deeper and more diligent information processing about the criminal justice system, leading individuals to reconsider their attitudes and behaviors in order to relieve feelings of sadness. Sadness is a unique and underexplored emotional experience that potentially helps citizens process and interpret counter-attitudinal information around policing. Ultimately, sadness may be driving support for policing policy reform and promoting greater peace and justice in the United States criminal justice system.

Author

• James Steur