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LOADINGERROR LOADING Political campaigns often run on messages of fear: In the 2024 presidential election, President Donald Trump said the country would be “finished” if Vice President Kamala Harris were elected. Harris, meanwhile, claimed a second-term Trump would walk into the Oval Office with an “enemies list” and seek revenge and “unchecked power.” Fear-mongering messaging is effective, especially when it comes from the political right, since people tend to lean more conservative in times of external or foreign threats. For instance, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, national polls showed that support for Republican President George W. Bush rose by 39 points to a record-breaking 90% approval rating. Temporarily, more Americans supported conservative-leaning security policies post 9/11, including the Patriot Act, which significantly expanded the surveillance and law enforcement powers of federal agencies. Advertisement Conventional wisdom assumes that it’s fear that drives shifts to the right when people feel threatened, but a new study suggests it’s a different emotion in the driver’s seat: Anger. “Some prominent theories in social and political psychology have proposed that fear drives these effects, but surprisingly few studies have actually tested this idea,” said Alan Lambert, the co-author of the study and an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Washington University. “We did, and found that anger, far more than fear, was responsible for these threat-driven ‘shift to the right’ effects,” Lambert said. Advertisement Specifically after terrorist attacks, people want retribution and to punish the people who did it, said Lambert, who co-authored the research with Seattle University’s Fade Eadeh. To find that out, Lambert and Eadeh conducted three experiments with over 2,000 participants. In the first experiment, the researchers presented participants with descriptions of realistic, but fictional, politicians espousing either conventionally conservative “hawkish” or liberal “dovish” positions. Advertisement “Among those participants previously primed with reminders of a previous terrorist attack on the U.S., we found greater support and liking for the hawk,” Lambert told HuffPost. “This effect occurred regardless of whether the politician was identified as a Republican or a Democrat.” Notably, the duo found relatively little impact of fear, and this was true not only in this initial study but also in two additional experiments, which involved over 2,000 participants. Still, these opinion shifts were specific to the threat at hand. For instance, anger about terrorism increased support for aggressive military action against Islamist groups, but didn’t affect views on unrelated topics like abortion, corporate power or anti-Mexican attitudes tied to the border. People stayed on topic with their anger. Advertisement Eadeh’s previous research found that anger can also drive people toward liberal views when the threat involves areas where liberals are seen as more competent, like health care or the environment. In those cases, anger shifted opinions in a liberal direction on the issues directly tied to the threat. YourSupportMakes The Story Your SupportFuelsOur Mission Your SupportFuelsOur Mission Join Those Who Make It Possible HuffPost stands apart because we report for the people, not the powerful. Our journalism is fearless, inclusive, and unfiltered. Join the membership program and help strengthen news that puts people first. We remain committed to providing you with the unflinching, fact-based journalism everyone deserves. Thank you again for your support along the way. We’re truly grateful for readers like you! Your initial support helped get us here and bolstered our newsroom, which kept us strong during uncertain times. Now as we continue, we need your help more than ever. We hope you will join us once again. We remain committed to providing you with the unflinching, fact-based journalism everyone deserves. Thank you again for your support along the way. We’re truly grateful for readers like you! Your initial support helped get us here and bolstered our newsroom, which kept us strong during uncertain times. Now as we continue, we need your help more than ever. We hope you will join us once again. Support HuffPost Already a member? Log in to hide these messages. Although the study didn’t address it, Lambert gave some thought to how anger drove voters into Trump’s arms not once, but twice. Advertisement “Anger was a significant driver of their support for Trump, and that was true both times he was elected,” Lambert said. “But importantly, that anger was not due to terrorist attacks. Rather, it was almost certainly due, at least in part, to the anger that conservative voters felt towards Democrats.” It’s a fascinating time to study political polarization and Lambert is keeping busy. In future studies, he said he wants to explore whether some threats might make people more set in their ways and beliefs, making liberals more liberal and conservatives more conservative.
