POLEMIC

In 2016 with the surprise election of Trump and the Brexit referendum, there was widespread concern about how emotional and negative the rhetoric of politicians had become. Also, increasingly, media pointed to emotions such as anger and anxiety to explain what looked like a general, global democratic revolt against the establishment. The POLEMIC project was borne out of these concerns.

The project results suggest no need for alarmism about emotions. There is not a singular trend towards increasing negativity in politics. Tone and facial expressions affect people but the effect sizes we find are modest and also much lower than the effects of agreement with a politician on substantive terms. More worrying is perhaps the lack of connection between people’s conscious experience of their emotions, the emotion labels they use, and the unconscious processes that drive emotions, information processing, and political behaviours.

Should politics be strictly rational, and emotions be banned from the domain? Although some have suggested this, turning off emotions means turning off the brain. That is, affective and cognitive processes are deeply interconnected. As such, the question ought to be: how can we use emotions to be a positive force for democracy?

You can read a project summary here.