Political attitudes and opinions can and do shift, sometimes drastically. Recent psychological research from Washington University in St. Louis offers insight into how emotional responses to threats contribute to shifts in political attitudes.
One striking example of how emotions drive political shifts is that people tend to become more supportive of conservative views during times of external, or foreign, threat.
Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, for example, national polls showed that support for President George W. Bush — a moderately conservative Republican — soared by 39 points to a record-breaking 90% approval rating. During that time, people supported conservative policies, such as the Patriot Act, which emphasized national security.
The underlying processes responsible for these shifts have been less clear, though. Psychologists have long assumed fear makes people seek security. This idea goes back to early theories of authoritarianism, which suggest that strict rules and strong leaders are more appealing when people are fearful. However, previous research in this field has not measured emotion to confirm that fear is, in fact, driving these changes.
A recent study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General provides much-needed clarity on these issues. With evidence from carefully structured experiments, researchers found that anger, not fear, is responsible for driving shifts in political attitudes.
“Anger is a more viable candidate for driving these sorts of effects,” said Alan Lambert, an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences at WashU. He said that anger is one of the few emotions associated with the “approach” part of the brain. As a result, experiencing anger causes people to lash out rather than retreat.
“They want retribution (for terrorist attacks), they want to punish the people who did it, that motive is driven primarily by anger,” added Lambert, who co-authored the research with Seattle University’s Fade Eadeh.
To study whether anger might be the main force behind these political shifts, Lambert and Eadeh conducted three experiments with over 2,000 participants. In one experiment, participants read either a news story about a terrorist attack or a neutral scientific article about food intolerance. Then they rated a politician who supported a military or diplomatic approach to terrorism. In a second experiment, people were either reminded about terrorism, framing it in terms of justice or security, or they read an article unrelated to terrorism. In a third study, they asked people what made them angry or fearful about terrorism or to write about something irrelevant. In these latter two experiments, they also asked participants to evaluate various political policies, some related to Islamist terrorism and some that were not. Afterward, participants shared their views on different political issues, some related to terrorism and some not.
Across all three studies, the researchers found that anger — not fear — was the primary emotion tied to a shift toward conservative views. But these changes were narrow. In particular, people shifted their opinions only on topics connected to the threat they were considering. For example, anger about terrorism made people more supportive of aggressive military policies towards Islamists, but had no impact on unrelated issues, such as abortion, big business or anti-Mexican attitudes.
As shown by earlier research by Eadeh, anger also plays the dominant role in cases where a threat makes liberalism more appealing. In particular, when people were reminded of a danger in an area where liberals are seen as more capable — such as health care or the environment — anger again led to a shift in political preferences related to these specific issues, but this time toward liberal views.
The issue is complex, warned Eadeh, who was a doctoral student with Lambert at WashU before joining Seattle University.
“Sometimes, political views and public policies may be the answer to certain threats. But it’s also possible that some threats can lead to political polarization, while others have no clear impact on politics at all,” he said.
In the future, Lambert hopes to explore whether some threats might lead people to become even more set in their beliefs, making liberals more liberal and conservatives more conservative.
Eadeh FR, Lambert AJ. An anger-based framework for understanding terrorism-driven “shifts to the right”: How and why Islamist-focused threats produce narrow changes in political preferences. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Epub 2025. DOI https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001737
