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Examining the Distinct Effects of Emotive Triggers on Public Reactions to International Terrorism

2013; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 25; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09546553.2012.692739

1556-1836

Çiğdem V. Şirin, Nehemia Geva,

Misinformation and Its Impacts

Abstract In recent years, a growing body of research has set out to examine the role that emotions play in shaping political attitudes and behaviors regarding terrorism. However, one major issue that is generally overlooked is whether the thematic relevance of emotive triggers leads to differential effects on people's reactions to international terrorism. Specifically, does anger—regardless of its source—tend to drive people towards supporting an aggressive foreign policy option to counter terrorism, or do the thematic underpinnings of anger (i.e., the specific contents that trigger this particular emotion, such as watching a news story about a recent terrorist attack) matter vis-à-vis the policy choice? To address this gap, this study experimentally examines the impact of anger—induced by thematically relevant versus irrelevant emotive triggers—on people's cognitive processing and foreign policy preferences regarding international terrorism. Overall, we find that the induction of anger via thematically relevant emotive triggers leads to a higher tendency for selecting a military option, a lower amount of information acquisition, and a shorter processing time in response to terror-related incidents. Keywords: emotionsinformation processingpolicy preferencespublic opinionterrorism Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank José D. Villalobos and the three anonymous reviewers for their instructive comments and suggestions. We would also like to thank Uri Geva for programming the DecTracer. Notes Note: *p ≤ .10; **p ≤ .05. The dependent variable is coded as 0 = Evacuation, 1 = Military targeting. Robust standard errors are in parentheses. The emotion-neutral control condition is the reference category. Anne Aly and Lelia Green, “Fear, Anxiety and the State of Terror,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 33, no. 3 (2010): 268–281; Daniel Bar-Tal and Daniela Labin, “The Effect of a Major Event on Stereotyping: Terrorist Attacks in Israel and Israeli Adolescents’ Perceptions of Palestinians, Jordanians and Arabs,” European Journal of Social Psychology 31, no. 3 (2001): 265–280; Darren Davis and Brian Silver, “Civil Liberties vs. Security: Public Opinion in the Context of the Terrorist Attacks on America,” American Journal of Political Science 48, no. 1 (2004): 28–47; Nehemia Friedland and Ariel Merari, “The Psychological Impact of Terrorism: A Double-Edged Sword,” Political Psychology 6, no. 4 (1985): 591–604; Shana K. 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Leonie Huddy, Stanley Feldman, Charles Taber, and Gallya Lahav, “Threat, Anxiety, and Support of Anti-Terrorism Policies,” American Journal of Political Science 49, no. 3 (2005): 610–625; Jennifer S. Lerner, Roxana M. Gonzalez, Deborah A. Small, and Baruch Fischhoff, “Effects of Fear and Anger on Perceived Risks of Terrorism: A National Field Experiment,” Psychological Science 14, no. 2 (2003): 144–150; and Linda J. Skitka, Christopher W. Bauman, Nicholas P. Aramovich, and G. Scott Morgan, “Confrontational and Preventative Policy Responses to Terrorism: Anger Wants a Fight and Fear Wants ‘Them’ to Go Away,” Basic and Applied Social Psychology 28, no. 4 (2006): 375–384. Ibid. One should note that there is no universally accepted definition of international terrorism. Nevertheless, the literature contains several useful conceptualizations that offer some common ground to build on for operational purposes. For instance, Jenkins posits that international terrorism consists of terror acts with clear international repercussions such as incidents in which terrorists operate abroad to strike their targets, select certain targets because of their connections to a foreign state, or attack international lines of commerce. On a parallel basis, Wilkinson defines international terrorism as “political terrorism directed at foreign targets; concerted by factions of more than one state; or aimed at influencing the policies of a foreign government.” For the purposes of this study, we focus on acts of international terrorism in a country targeting the citizens and interests of another country. Therein, because the subject pool of our experiment was drawn from the United States, the specific context of the study concerns the reactions of the U.S. public to terrorist attacks abroad targeting U.S. citizens and interests. See Brian M. 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Our experimental design section offers an extended comparative discussion of public reactions to terrorist attacks versus traffic accidents (particularly in terms of the varying dread/unknown risk characteristics and in further reference to the social amplification of risk framework). See Roger E. Kasperson, Ortwin Renn, Paul Slovic, Halina S. Brown, Jacque Emel, Robert Goble, et al., “The Social Amplification of Risk: A Conceptual Framework,” Risk Analysis 8, no. 2 (1988): 177–187; Paul Slovic, “Perception of Risk,” Science 236, no. 4799 (1987): 280–285; and William J. Burns and Paul Slovic, “The Diffusion of Fear: Modeling Community Response to a Terrorist Strike,” The Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation: Applications, Methodology, Technology 4, no. 4 (2007): 298–317. Lerner et al. (see note 2 above); Skitka et al. (see note 2 above). Bodenhausen et al. 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See, for example, Vincent Yzerbyt, Muriel Dumont, Daniel Wigboldus, and Ernestine Gordijn, “I Feel for Us: The Impact of Categorization and Identification on Emotions and Action Tendencies,” British Journal of Social Psychology 42, no. 4 (2003): 533–550. W. Kip Viscusi and Richard J. Zeckhauser, “Sacrificing Civil Liberties to Reduce Terrorism Risks,” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 26, nos. 2/3 (2003): 99–120. Ibid. See, for example, Brigitte L. Nacos, “Terrorism as Breaking News: Attack on America,” Political Science Quarterly 118, no. 1 (2003): 23–52; Brigitte L. Nacos, Yaeli Bloch-Elkon, and Robert Shapiro, Selling Fear: Counterterrorism, the Media, and Public Opinion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); and Shoshani and Slone (see note 12 above). Lerner et al. (see note 2 above); Skitka et al. (see note 2 above); Bodenhausen et al. (see note 22 above); Lerner and Tiedens (see note 24 above); Tiedens (see note 24 above); Tiedens and Linton (see note 24 above); and Lerner and Keltner (see note 22 above). As Izard et al. suggest, individuals can experience several emotions at any given moment and one emotion may trigger another. Taking this possibility into consideration, in addition to anger, we asked the participants whether they experienced several other emotions (specifically, fear and sadness) in reaction to the experimental stimuli as part of our manipulation checks. The participants rated these emotions on a scale of 0 to 10. The results demonstrate that the means for anger expressed by participants after exposure to emotive triggers in both the thematically relevant and irrelevant conditions (M R = 7.00 and M IR = 5.65) are substantively higher than the means for fear (M R = 3. 55 and M IR = 2.35) and sadness (M R = 4.95 and M IR = 3.75). The results thus suggest that anger is the dominant emotion induced by the experimental stimuli. It is also important to note that even if other emotions are intervening with the predicted effects of anger, our experimental results would be more, not less, conservative because it would demonstrate that the hypothesized effects for anger still hold even in the presence of other emotional states that would otherwise nullify or mediate the impact of anger. Carroll E. Izard, Brian P. Ackerman, Kristen M. Schoff, and Sarah E. Fine, “Self-Organization of Discrete Emotions, Emotion Patterns, and Emotion-Cognition Relations,” in Marc D. Lewis and Isabela Granic, eds., Emotion, Development, and Self-Organization (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 15–36. See also Sadler et al. (see note 1 above). See, for example, Laurence G. Grimm, Statistical Applications for the Behavioral Sciences (New York: Wiley, 1993). See, for example, Burns and Slovic (see note 36 above); Kasperson et al. 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Ben Sheppard, “Mitigating Terror and Avoidance Behavior through the Risk Perception Matrix to Augment Resilience,” Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management 8, no. 1 (2011): 1. See, for example, Baruch Fischhoff, “Assessing and Communicating the Risks of Terrorism,” in Albert H. Teich, Stephen D. Nelson, and Stephen J. Lita, eds., Science and Technology in a Vulnerable World (Washington, DC: AAAS, 2002), 51–64; and Rogers et al. (see note 47 above). Turner (see note 26 above). See also Monique Mitchell Turner, Rajiv N. Rimal, Daniel Morrison, and Hyojin Kim, “The Role of Anxiety in Seeking and Retaining Risk Information: Testing the Risk Perception Attitude Framework in Two Studies,” Human Communication Research 32, no. 2 (2006): 130–156. Ibid. Ibid., 118. Luke Musgrove and Craig McGarty, “Opinion-Based Group Membership as a Predictor of Collective Emotional Responses and Support for Pro- and Anti-War Action,” Social Psychology 39, no. 1 (2008): 37–47. See, for example, Ole R. Holsti, Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); James A. Nathan and James K. Oliver, “Public Opinion and U.S. Security Policy,” Armed Forces & Society 2, no. 1 (1975): 46–62; Benjamin I. Page and Robert Y. Shapiro, “Effects of Public Opinion on Policy,” American Political Science Review 77, no. 1 (1983): 175–190; and Richard Sobel, The Impact of Public Opinion on U.S. Foreign Policy since Vietnam: Constraining the Colossus (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). For instance, Sears argues that young adults have “less-crystallized attitudes, less-formulated senses of self, stronger cognitive skills, stronger tendencies to comply with authority, and more unstable peer group relationships.” Such differences may create concern about the generalizability of experimental findings based on student samples. However, by using Monte Carlo simulations on different levels of attitude crystallization, Druckman and Kam statistically demonstrate that “any convenience sample poses a problem only when the size of an experimental treatment effect depends upon a characteristic on which the convenience sample has virtually no variance.” David O. Sears, “College Sophomores in the Laboratory: Influences of a Narrow Data Base on Social Psychology's View of Human Nature,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 51, no. 3 (1986): 515; and James N. Druckman and Cindy D. Kam, “Students as Experimental Participants: A Defense of the ‘Narrow Data Base,'” in James N. Druckman, Donald P. Green, James H. Kuklinski, and Arthur Lupia, eds., Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Political Science (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 41. See also Donald R. Kinder and Thomas R. Palfrey, “On Behalf of Experimental Political Science,” in Donald R. Kinder and Thomas R. Palfrey, eds., Experimental Foundations of Political Science (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press 1993), 1–42; and Rose McDermott, “Experimental Methods in Political Science,” Annual Review of Political Science 5 (2002): 31–61. Douglas G. Mook, “In Defense of External Invalidity,” American Psychologist 38, no. 4 (1983): 386. See also Rebecca B. Morton and Kenneth C. Williams, Experimental Political Science and the Study of Causality: From Nature to the Lab (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Druckman and Kam (see note 77 above). Scott S. Gartner, “The Multiple Effects of Casualties on Public Support for War: An Experimental Approach,” American Political Science Review 102, no. 1 (2008): 95–106. http://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu. Alex Mintz, Steven B. Redd, and Arnold Vedlitz, “Can We Generalize from Student Experiments to the Real World in Political Science, Military Affairs, and International Relations?” Journal of Conflict Resolution 50, no. 5 (2006): 757–776. Druckman and Kam (see note 77 above). See also, for example, Cindy D. Kam, “Who Toes the Party Line? Cues, Values, and Individual Differences,” Political Behavior 27, no. 2 (2005): 163–182; Anton Kühberger, “The Influence of Framing on Risky Decisions: A Meta-analysis,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 75, no. 1 (1998): 23–55; and Joanne M. Miller and Jon A. Krosnick, “News Media Impact on the Ingredients of Presidential Evaluations: Politically Knowledgeable Citizens Are Guided by a Trusted Source,” American Journal of Political Science 44, no. 2 (2000): 301–315. Gartner (see note 79 above). Lars Willnat et al., “Media Use, Anti-Americanism and International Support for the Iraq War,” International Communication Gazette 68, nos. 5–6 (2006): 533–550. Susy Kovatz, Ilan Kutz, Gil Rubin, Rachel Dekel, and Louis Shenkman, “Comparing the Distress of American and Israeli Medical Students Studying in Israel during a Period of Terror,” Medical Education 40, no. 4 (2006): 389–393. Ibid. Friedland and Merari (see note 1 above). See also, for example, Bar-Tal and Labin (see note 1 above); and Carol Gordon and Asher Arian, “Threat and Decision Making,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 45, no. 2 (2001): 196–215. See, for example, Huddy et al. (see note 2 above); Lerner et al. (see note 2 above); Sadler et al. (see note 1 above); and Skitka et al. (see note 2 above). Additional informationNotes on contributorsCigdem V. Sirin Cigdem V. Sirin is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Texas at El Paso. Her main areas of research are international relations and political psychology, with a particular interest in conflict behavior. Nehemia Geva Nehemia Geva is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Texas A&M University. He specializes in foreign policy decision making and political cognition.