Emotion and the Persuasive Power of Campaign Ads

By Ted Brader

An excerpt from Campaigning for Hearts and Minds: How Emotional Appeals in Political Ads Work

[P]ersuasion may come through the hearers, when the speech stirs their emotions. Our judgments when we are pleased and friendly are not the same as when we are pained and hostile . . . [A]n emotional speaker always makes his audience feel with him, even when there is nothing in his arguments.

Aristotle (340 B.C.)

Political scientists remain ambivalent about the susceptibility of the American electorate to persuasion. The disillusioned consensus on participation . . . suggests a mass of voters whose weak grasp on public affairs leaves their minds pliable to political arguments, but whose low interest leaves their minds nearly unreachable by political appeals. When voters attend to politics at all, they rely overwhelmingly on partisan habits and well-worn criteria to choose a candidate, disregarding much of what campaigns have to say. If campaigns are instruments of communication designed to persuade and motivate citizens, and the attainability of these goals is in question, then why are so many resources expended, especially by the losers? Researchers have amassed considerable evidence on how voters make up their minds, but know far less about what politicians can do to change their minds . . .

Researchers face serious obstacles in documenting the consequences of campaigns and political communication generally, because the task often requires picking out subtle signals from a world of noise using less than ideal data. Nonetheless, scholars have recently made promising headway. Several influential studies document the effects of information, especially mass-mediated messages, at a broad level. Although they leave uncertain what is in the hands of candidates, the studies show how the content and volume of information across political environments, including different election campaigns, shapes opinions and choices. . .

At the same time, a new wave of research on emotion . . . has suggested that it’s not just the information that matters, it’s what you do with it. These studies argue that emotional aspects of political communication and the emotional responses of citizens can alter how citizens process new information, form political attitudes, and make political choices. . . They show that citizens who feel calm about presidential candidates are more likely to act on partisan habits, but those who feel anxious are more likely to attend to new information, defect from partisanship, and vote on the basis of issue and trait assessments.

Despite the promise of this research, we are left with doubts. Voter anxiety and enthusiasm could stem from a variety of sources; the research to date simply assumes that responses are inspired directly by candidates or issues. Moreover, emotional responses could be an outcome of the same process that produces the observed behavioral changes. . . [C]orrelations in survey data offer no sure escape from skeptics who claim emotion is epiphenomenal.

. . . I tested campaign advertising’s capacity, through the use of emotional appeals, to redirect attention and change political attitudes and choices. Experimental evidence demonstrates that exposure to emotionally evocative advertising can considerably influence electoral choices. Consistent with the theoretical predictions, emotional cues accomplish this by shaping the extent to which citizens rely on habit or increased reasoning and vigilance. . .

Fear plays a particularly decisive role in the process of persuasion. Appeals to fear, cued with harsh images and music, help to pry open the door to attitude change and unexpected choices. Fear does not guarantee a change of mind but, relative to either enthusiasm or less emotional appeals, it offers the best shot at doing so. . . Fear ads can win converts or create uncertainty among those who were initially opposed, but they do not achieve this entirely or even mainly by increasing acceptance of the ad’s message. The ads instead cause viewers to place less weight on prior preferences or ideology and more weight on contemporary assessments of the issue and character strengths of the candidates or their gut reactions to the campaign message. We see something similar for capturing the attention of viewers. Fear ads do not improve general recall of the ad or name recognition of the candidates, but they do motivate citizens to pay greater attention to related information in the news and to seek out more such information from political and nonpolitical sources. In most cases, these ads are especially effective on those who prefer the opposing candidate and those who are most knowledgeable about politics.

Enthusiasm can exert a powerful influence on political attitudes and choices, but it is tied more to the campaign processes of activation and reinforcement than to persuasion. Appeals to enthusiasm, with warm images and music, strengthen preexisting attitudes and reliance on them in the voter’s choice of candidates. Thus, the evidence suggests that they are an excellent tool for “rallying the faithful.” Given the attempt to stir up positive emotions, enthusiasm or “feel-good” ads ironically are likely to polarize the electorate through a combination of attraction and repulsion. These ads simultaneously renew the commitment of supporters and spur the determination of opponents. Like cueing fear, cueing enthusiasm is most effective on those with greater political knowledge.

The short-term impact of both types of appeals is often quite substantial. We can again confidently answer the question with which we began: . . . candidates can use television advertising to persuade voters. Fear appeals provide candidates with an effective instrument for convincing citizens to change their minds, and enthusiasm appeals provide them with a powerful tool for invigorating supporters.

Emotional appeals may enhance the power of campaign communication, but are they legitimate and desirable means of communicating in a democracy? Should we be more alarmed than impressed at their effectiveness and with the use of fear as an instrument in democratic elections? Certainly many describe these practices disparagingly as “preying on” the fears of ordinary people. . .

However, not everyone agrees about the illegitimacy of fear appeals. Some may see virtue in Aristotle’s counsel that “fear sets us thinking what can be done” or the lesson behind Samuel Johnson’s observation that the appearance of a threat to one’s life “concentrates the mind.” They are not likely to argue that every, or even frequent, use of fear is laudable, but they might observe that many nonemotional arguments are also worthy of condemnation (e.g., those based on stereotypes, deception, or selfishness). Indeed, opponents of emotional appeals often cling to the powerful but misguided view of emotion and reason as antagonistic, when contemporary research suggests emotion is essential to adaptive social decisionmaking. From this perspective, cueing anxiety may allow politicians to appropriately alarm otherwise rationally inattentive and predisposed citizens to wake up to potential danger and reconsider what needs to be done. . .

Excerpted from Campaigning for Hearts and Minds: How Emotional Appeals in Political Ads Work, by Ted Brader, published in the United States by the University of Chicago Press. © 2006 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved.