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Incivility Diminishes Interest in What Politicians Have to Say

Incivility is prevalent in society suggesting a potential benefit. Within politics, theorists and strategists often claim incivility grabs attention and stokes interest in what a politician has to say. In contrast, we propose incivility diminishes overall interest in what a politician has to say bec...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Feinberg, Matthew, Frimer, Jeremy A.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: SAGE Publications 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10396794/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37545484
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/19485506221136182
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author Feinberg, Matthew
Frimer, Jeremy A.
author_facet Feinberg, Matthew
Frimer, Jeremy A.
author_sort Feinberg, Matthew
collection PubMed
description Incivility is prevalent in society suggesting a potential benefit. Within politics, theorists and strategists often claim incivility grabs attention and stokes interest in what a politician has to say. In contrast, we propose incivility diminishes overall interest in what a politician has to say because people find the incivility morally distasteful. Studies 1a and 1b examined the relationship between uncivil language and followership in the Twitter feeds of Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, finding incivility reduced their following on the platform. In Studies 2–3, we manipulated how uncivil a number of politicians were and found that incivility consistently depressed interest in what they had to say. These effects of incivility are generalized to both political allies and opponents. Observers’ moral disapproval of the incivility mediated the diminished interest, suppressing the attention-grabbing nature of incivility. Altogether, our findings indicate that the public reacts more negatively to political incivility than previously thought.
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spelling pubmed-103967942023-08-04 Incivility Diminishes Interest in What Politicians Have to Say Feinberg, Matthew Frimer, Jeremy A. Soc Psychol Personal Sci Articles Incivility is prevalent in society suggesting a potential benefit. Within politics, theorists and strategists often claim incivility grabs attention and stokes interest in what a politician has to say. In contrast, we propose incivility diminishes overall interest in what a politician has to say because people find the incivility morally distasteful. Studies 1a and 1b examined the relationship between uncivil language and followership in the Twitter feeds of Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, finding incivility reduced their following on the platform. In Studies 2–3, we manipulated how uncivil a number of politicians were and found that incivility consistently depressed interest in what they had to say. These effects of incivility are generalized to both political allies and opponents. Observers’ moral disapproval of the incivility mediated the diminished interest, suppressing the attention-grabbing nature of incivility. Altogether, our findings indicate that the public reacts more negatively to political incivility than previously thought. SAGE Publications 2022-11-16 2023-09 /pmc/articles/PMC10396794/ /pubmed/37545484 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/19485506221136182 Text en © The Author(s) 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
spellingShingle Articles
Feinberg, Matthew
Frimer, Jeremy A.
Incivility Diminishes Interest in What Politicians Have to Say
title Incivility Diminishes Interest in What Politicians Have to Say
title_full Incivility Diminishes Interest in What Politicians Have to Say
title_fullStr Incivility Diminishes Interest in What Politicians Have to Say
title_full_unstemmed Incivility Diminishes Interest in What Politicians Have to Say
title_short Incivility Diminishes Interest in What Politicians Have to Say
title_sort incivility diminishes interest in what politicians have to say
topic Articles
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10396794/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37545484
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/19485506221136182
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