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Feeling is Believing? How emotions influence the effectiveness of political fact-checking messages

Weeks, Brian Edward
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1400581789

Abstract Details

2014, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Communication.
Political misperceptions are a complex problem for scholars, journalists, and politicians. Despite ubiquitous fact-checking and corrective messages online and in the media, polls show citizens are consistently misinformed about a variety of political issues. To date, most explanations for the failure of these messages to correct false beliefs have centered only on partisan-based information processing strategies, which suggest citizens are more likely to believe a claim that reflects well on their preferred party while rejecting those that reflect poorly. However, I argue there are several reasons to suspect this approach by itself is insufficient for explaining and predicting why and how fact-checking messages often fail. In this dissertation I build on affective intelligence theory and propose a theoretical model that outlines how citizens’ unique emotional states interact with their party affiliation to influence belief in political misperceptions. I argue the experience of two discrete emotions of the same valence, anxiety and anger, can have dramatically different effects on citizens’ beliefs about politics by determining whether they consider misinformation in either a partisan or more deliberative fashion. The unique influence of anxiety and anger is tested in two experimental studies that manipulate emotional states and show how these discrete emotions come to have contrasting effects on people’s beliefs about contemporary political issues. Study 1 tests whether emotions unrelated to the target of the misperception can influence belief, while Study 2 examines if emotions stemming directly from the issue of interest affect beliefs. These studies provide evidence that anger facilitates partisan, motivated processing of inaccurate political claims, which results in beliefs that are consistent with prior attitudes. Anxiety contributes to more deliberative consideration of the content of the claims and less reliance on partisanship, which results in beliefs based more on the nature of the evidence at hand. The results of the study suggest that much of the difficulty in fact-checking previously attributed to partisan motivated reasoning may be a result of the discrete emotion anger, specifically. Based on these findings I argue that studies of political misinformation should examine the interactions between citizens’ discrete emotional states, their partisanship, and the nature of the message in order to better understand the underlying theoretical mechanism driving false beliefs
R. Kelly Garrett, Ph.D. (Advisor)
David Ewoldsen, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
R. Lance Holbert, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Emily Moyer-Gusé, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
189 p.
Communication; Political Science
political communication; misinformation; misperceptions; false beliefs; fact-checking; emotions; motivated reasoning

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Weeks, B. E. (2014). Feeling is Believing? How emotions influence the effectiveness of political fact-checking messages [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1400581789

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Weeks, Brian. Feeling is Believing? How emotions influence the effectiveness of political fact-checking messages. 2014. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1400581789.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Weeks, Brian. "Feeling is Believing? How emotions influence the effectiveness of political fact-checking messages." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1400581789

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1400581789
5,159
© 2014, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.