Disgust, Anxiety, and Political Learning in the Face of Threat

Emotions feature prominently in political rhetoric and media frames, and they have potent effects on how people process information. Yet, existing research has largely overlooked the influence of disgust, which is a basic emotion that leads people to avoid contamination threats. We illustrate how disgust may impede learning, as compared to the more commonly studied emotion of anxiety. Disgust and anxiety are natural reactions to many kinds of political threats, but the two emotions influence political engagement in different ways. This study investigated the distinctive effects of disgust in a series of experiments that manipulated information about the outbreak of an infectious disease. People who felt disgusted by a health threat were less likely to learn crucial facts about the threat and less likely to seek additional information. Thus, disgust has the counterintuitive effect of decreasing public engagement in precisely those situations where it is most critical. Replication Materials: The data, code, and any additional materials required to replicate all analyses in this article are available on the American Journal of Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/JTV6W6. Emotions are central to our understanding of political behavior because they provide a motivational force behind participation, learning, and attitude change (Huddy, Mason, and Aarøe 2015; Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen 2000; Valentino et al. 2011). Yet emotions are more than a matter of individual psychology. “They also depend,” Huddy (2004, 802–3) writes, “on larger forces at work within politics and the media. ” Elites strategically employ emotional appeals to persuade citizens to support particular policies or candidates (Jerit 2004; Jerit, Kuklinski, and Quirk 2009; Lupia and Menning 2009), and emotions occupy a central place in the frames journalists use to construct news stories (e.g., Iyengar 1991). Recent outbreaks of infectious disease provide a vivid illustration of how people’s emotions and the political world may interact. One recent study, lamenting the public hysteria of the 2014 Ebola outbreak, concluded that “an informed, activated public is of utmost importance in protecting the health of the public” (Ratzan and Scott Clifford is Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, The University of Houston, 3551 Cullen Boulevard, Room 447, Houston, TX 77204-3011 (sclifford@uh.edu). Jennifer Jerit is Professor, Department of Political Science, Stony Brook University, Social and Behavioral Sciences Building, 7th Floor, Stony Brook, NY 11794 (jennifer.jerit@stonybrook.edu). We thank Kevin Arceneaux, Ryan Enos, Eric Groenendyk, Cindy Kam, Spencer Piston, Christine Peterson, Kathleen Searles, and Nick Valentino for helpful comments and the University of Houston’s Division of Research and Stony Brook University’s College of Arts and Sciences for funding. Previous versions of this article were presented at Stony Brook University, Columbia University, MIT, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, Princeton University, University of Vienna, University of Alabama, the New York Area Political Psychology Meeting, and the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. Moritsugu 2014, 1215; emphasis added). But how does an “informed, activated public” come about? Paul and Sherrill (2015, 3) point to the government and mass media: “State-citizen communication ensures that the public correctly understands the risks associated with the outbreak and knows how the disease is transmitted. Information campaigns can reduce public anxiety while keeping the population educated about what to do if the disease spreads. ” We argue that the specific emotions evoked by media coverage—in particular, whether the emotion is primarily disgust versus anxiety—influence how people respond to a health threat and determine whether an “informed, activated public” emerges in a time of crisis. Anxiety is a natural reaction to many threats reported by the mass media (Albertson and Gadarian 2015). But recent epidemics, some of which involve gory symptoms or animalto-human transmission, may also evoke feelings of disgust (also see Halkjelsvik and Rise 2015). Disgust and anxiety are natural reactions to many health threats, but as American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 00, No. 0, xxxx 2018, Pp. 1–14 C ©2018, Midwest Political Science Association DOI: 10.1111/ajps.12350