Reducing Political Dehumanization by Pairing Facts With Personal Experiences

The media is increasingly blamed for inflaming political animosity, but it may also bridge partisan divides—with the right strategies. Past research highlights the outgroup-experience effect: Sharing personal experiences (and not facts) helps to reduce partisan animosity. However, sharing facts is a pillar of good journalism and is essential for mediated political communication. Across four studies in two countries, we show that journalists, and citizens on social media sites, can share facts about contentious political issues (gun and climate policy), while simultaneously increasing tolerance and reducing dehumanization of political opponents. We extend the outgroup-experience effect by introducing factual content alongside personal experiences of political adversaries (i.e., a combination approach). These effects are replicated in both the United States and Germany although in Germany the personal experience intervention is only beneficial for people with more extreme attitudes.     

Terror,Terror Everywhere? How Terrorism News Shape Support for Anti‐Muslim Policies as a Function of Perceived Threat Severity and Controllability

Terrorist attacks committed by the so‐called Islamic State are rising in Western countries. How the news media portray these attacks may crucially influence emotional responses and support for anti‐Muslim policies such as immigration bans. Based on the Extended parallel response model (EPRM, Witte, 1992), we theorize that specific features of terrorism news such as threat severity (e.g., high vs. low number of potential terrorist offenders) and threat controllability (e.g., nondiffuse, controllable threat vs. diffuse, uncontrollable threat) influence individuals’ emotional reactions and policy support. A quota‐based online experiment (N = 501) reveals that news articles featuring a high number of offenders increase individuals’ fear of terror irrespective of whether the threat is portrayed as controllable or not. News articles featuring a low number of offenders only evoke fear of terror if the threat is portrayed as diffuse. Additionally, news articles emphasizing a high number of offenders combined with a controllable terrorism threat elicit anger on the government. Both anger and fear of terror subsequently increase anti‐Muslim policy support.     

A New Look at Celebrity Endorsements in Politics: Investigating the Impact of Scandalous Celebrity Endorsers and Politicians’ Best Responses

When a celebrity receives negative news coverage, his or her endorsements of politicians can pose negative consequences for the politicians. We investigated such negative consequences with the help of two experimental studies. In Study 1 (celebrity involved in tax scandal), we manipulated whether an endorsement was initiated by a politician or a celebrity (i.e., controllability) in a 2 × 2 between-subject experiment. We also manipulated politicians’ responses (i.e., no response vs. response). Study 2 was a conceptual replication of the first experiment (celebrity involved in a real estate scandal). Results of Study 1 revealed that politicians are perceived to be more in control of self-initiated endorsements than other-initiated ones. Perceived controllability, in turn, influenced feelings of anger and pity, eventually affecting voting intentions. For self-initiated endorsements, no response appears to be the best reaction. By contrast, public response is advised when the endorsement was initiated by another entity. Results were replicated in Study 2. However, particular responses of a political candidate revealed no influences in connection with a real estate scandal. We explain our findings by applying the theory of planned behavior, attribution theory, and situational crisis communication theory.     

How Political Scandals Affect the Electorate. Tracing the Eroding and Spillover Effects of Scandals with a Panel Study

Political scandals are highly relevant for political decision-making and democratic processes more generally. While most prior research employed experimental and cross-sectional survey studies, we tested the effects of a political scandal in the context of the 2017 Austrian Parliamentary Elections using panel data (N = 559, both waves). Importantly, we used a unique data set collected before and just after a major scandal broke in the final election phase. Drawing on a motivated reasoning perspective, attribution theory, and the inclusion/exclusion model, our results revealed a scandal-eroding effect particularly damaging a candidate's own base of supporters and leaving followers in disappointment. The findings also showed a negative scandal-spillover effect for candidate supporters high in scandal knowledge decreasing political trust toward other politicians. Importantly, the results revealed that negative candidate evaluations are not a necessary precondition for negative spillover effects on political trust more generally.     

Minimal Theory of Causation and Causal Distinctions

Axiomathes - The Minimal Theory of Causation, presented in Graßhoff and May, 2001, aspires to be a version of a regularity analysis of causation able to correctly predict our causal...     

Not practicing what they preached! Exploring negative spillover effects of news about ex-politicians’ hypocrisy on party attitudes,voting intentions,and political trust

ABSTRACT

Political hypocrisy – a frequent feature of contemporary politics – oftentimes occurs when politicians resign from office and then engage in behavior that is in fundamental opposition to the standpoints they originally campaigned for as incumbents. Previous research has neglected to examine negative spillover effects of news about ex-politicians’ hypocritical behavior. Drawing from the inclusion/exclusion model and the feelings-as-information model, we conducted two experiments in two different countries and used different stimuli to increase external validity. Results suggest a dual process account of scandal spillover effects (an attitudinal and emotional mechanism) revealing that hypocrisy negatively affected both attitudes and emotions toward an ex-politician. Mediation analysis further showed that evaluations in turn negatively affected attitudes and voting intentions for the party the hypocritical politician used to belong to (attitudinal spillover process). No effects on general political trust emerged. In contrast, negative emotions had no effect on party attitudes and voting intentions but decreased political trust toward politicians in general (emotional spillover process). In line with the inclusion/exclusion model, the results help to explain inconsistent findings in previous studies that did not account for the suggested dual process account of spillover effects and underline the eroding effects of hypocrisy.