Social and Affective Responses to Political Information
This a Paper discussed in Social Media Analysis 11-772 in Autumn 2012.
Citation
Social and Affective Responses to Political Information. Doug Pierce, David P. Redlawsk, William W. Cohen, Tae Yano, Ramnath Balasubramanyan. 2012 Annual meeting of the American Political Science Association.
Online version
Social and Affective Responses to Political Information
Summary
This paper presents two studies exploring social and affective responses to political information. They hypothesize that people treat messages from in-group sources differently than they do messages from out-group sources. Evidence from two experiments indicates not only a link between affective reactions and social sharing behavior, but also that subjects treat information from in-group sources differently than they do information from outgroup sources.
The hypotheses are as following:
H1 (Affective Transmission): Subjects are more likely to share with other members of their social networks information that engenders an emotional reaction
H2 (Affective Contagion): Subjects are more likely to have emotional responses to information that comes from in-group sources rather than out-group sources
H3 (Social Transmission): Subjects are more likely to desire to share information from an in-group source than an out-group source
Evaluation
They recruited subjects enrolled in political science courses at Rutgers University during the summer and fall of 2011. The sample is a convenience one, and no claim is made that it is representative of any particular population. Subjects were told that they would be taking part in an experiment on information and social media sharing during a Presidential campaign and were offered extra credit for their participation. The sample (n = 163) had an average age of 22 and males made up 52.8% of the subjects. 55.2% of the sample identified as white, 11% black, 17.2% Asian, 10.5% Hispanic and 13.5% mixed/other. A plurality of the sample was Catholic (37.4%), with no other religious group comprising more than 10% of the sample; 25.2% of the subjects indicated they were not part of any religion. The sample had an average household income of between 50 and $75,000 per year.
The subjects took part in a simulated presidential campaign, set in the Dynamic Process Tracing Environment(DPTE). The results show that all three hypotheses are true.
Discussion
It is no exaggeration to say we live in an age in which information is more readily available than it has been in any other time in history. And while some maintain that social capital has declined in the “real” world, the advent of social media sites makes membership in virtual communities a possibility for large parts of the population. A social functional theory of emotions may help us understand how members of social networks respond to, process, and share information about politics and political figures. And this paper gives a very good example about how to study this.
