Emotions, politics and social media

Guest piece by Dr Michael Bossetta

This month I’m delighted to present a guest piece by Dr Michael Bossetta, political and data scientist at Lund University. His research explores the impact of social media on politics - and more specifically, how politicians and citizens use social media during elections. He also hosts the Social Media and Politics Podcast, a series where he interviews people on the cutting edge of research and practice in the field of digital political communication. In this piece he explores what social media can teach us about emotion in politics - what citizens expect from their politicians and how politicians and campaigners can adapt using this knowledge.

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Emotions are all the rage in studies of social media and politics these days. Part of the reason is surely Facebook’s rollout of the Reactions feature in 2016, allowing users to express how they feel about a post with more emotional nuance than a ‘Like.’ These emojis, which whistleblower documents claim amplified emotional content on the platform, created a new data type for us to study. Since academics are drawn to new data like bugs to a light, you’ll be seeing a lot more research on how emotions on social media affect X or Y aspect of politics.

What people find persuasive

So what can this research teach us about social media communication? Well, any social media communicator will tell you about the importance of storytelling, and getting people to feel part of your story is key to their engagement and mobilisation.

Perhaps no class of communicators knows this better than politicians, who battle over election narratives to persuade voters and drive them to the polls. Despite all the glitzy, data-driven tools on the market, Aristotle’s three modes of persuasion still hold: establishing credibility (ethos), reasoning with facts (logos), and appealing to emotions (pathos).

Michael deploying his persuasive tools on colleagues in Lund University.

Given the surge of outsider politicians coming to power across Western democracies, it seems like established political credibility is less important to voters. Every ‘fact’ now seems to have an ‘alternative fact,’ limiting voters’ trust in information and the logical presentation of arguments. That leaves emotions as the prime mode of political persuasion. Think of Obama’s appeals to ‘Hope,’ or the well-charted mantra of Trump ‘tapping into Anger’.

According to insights from neuroscience, Hope and Anger are both thought to be politically mobilising emotions. Affective Intelligence Theory, the main theory of emotions and politics, argues that both Hope and Anger stem from the same neural pathway in the brain. If you’ve read Thinking Fast and Slow, these emotions are governed by the ‘Slow’ system. This is where our memories are stored, and therefore our hopes and angers are activated in response to what we already know (that is, we get hopeful or angry about certain things because of our past associations with them).

By contrast, the ‘Fast’ system regulates Fear and Anxiety. We don’t need to have seen a bear before to realise we should probably run away from it. When Fear is activated, according to the theory, voters are demobilised, but more likely to search for new information. We want to alleviate the source of Fear, so we stay put and search for information until we return to a state of Calm. Think of the early days of COVID: we were demobilised, but open to any new information we could get our hands on.

If a politician tries to talk to you, shriek loudly to assert dominance.

How this plays out on social media

So now you’re caught up on the basic political theory of emotions – let’s get back to social media. As researchers, we can’t measure each individual users’ emotional state. But we can look at how politicians communicate emotions, and we can measure how users react to them as a low-cost, digital form of political mobilisation.

I want to briefly share with you the findings of a recent study that I think has an important message for communicators. We classified the emotions that American politicians expressed in images on Facebook and Instagram during the 2020 US election. Unsurprisingly, we found that they mostly expressed Happiness, followed by Calm (or ‘neutral’) expressions.

The interesting part is that we found Facebook and Instagram users reacted differently to these emotions. Whereas Instagram users rewarded Happiness from politicians with more engagement, Facebook users punished Happiness and instead preferred Calm. To us, this signals that different generations of social media users have different preferences about what a political leader should be. Younger users on Instagram seem to prefer politicians to express emotion, whereas older users on Facebook prefer neutrally expressive politicians and the traits that Calm projects: control, stability, and strength.

“Welcome to Facebook. Be chill or prepare to be punished.”

Of course, our study is limited by its focus on American politics, where campaigning tends to be much more theatrical than in most European countries. Due to differences in political culture, the expectations placed on European leaders may (or may not) be completely different.

Swedes, for example, value rationality and seriousness from their political leaders. This encouraged Ulf Kristersson, the new Prime Minister, to stop smiling and joking in interviews when he became opposition leader back in 2017. This could simply mean that culturally, Northern European leaders are expected to be serious and boring. Or, it could also mean that these leaders are overly catering to an older audience, since they reliably turn up to vote. If our findings hold outside of the US, such politicians are missing a huge opportunity to connect emotionally with young voters, who may be turned off by the stuffy politicians of yore.

Welcome to Sweden - no fun allowed.

Varying expectations

The lesson here is that when communicating a message across social media, different platform audiences may have wildly diverging worldviews on what they value and expect. While it’s no secret that content posted to one platform might not fly on another, we find evidence for platform differences even when it comes to emotions, which are supposedly universal and rooted in the brain. So, there’s simply no secret sauce for political engagement, and we may be picking up on a generation polarisation in terms of what platform audiences expect in the context of politics.

This reiterates the importance of ‘knowing your audience’ before launching a campaign. Not by guessing, but by talking to them, researching the platform and constantly reflecting and adjusting approaches. What do your audience value? And perhaps more importantly, how do they value it being communicated?

To trigger the mobilising power of emotions, you need to activate stored memories or create new associations entirely. The best way to understand your audience is to feel what they feel.

So get out there – start asking questions.