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The (Null) Effects of Happiness on Affective Polarization, Conspiracy Endorsement, and Deep Fake Recognition: Evidence from Five Survey Experiments in Three Countries
Affective polarization is a key concern in America and other democracies. Although past evidence suggests some ways to minimize it, there are no easily applicable interventions that have been found to work in the increasingly polarized climate. This project examines whether irrelevant factors, or in...
Autores principales: | , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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Springer US
2021
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8550506/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34720307 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11109-021-09701-1 |
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author | Yu, Xudong Wojcieszak, Magdalena Lee, Seungsu Casas, Andreu Azrout, Rachid Gackowski, Tomasz |
author_facet | Yu, Xudong Wojcieszak, Magdalena Lee, Seungsu Casas, Andreu Azrout, Rachid Gackowski, Tomasz |
author_sort | Yu, Xudong |
collection | PubMed |
description | Affective polarization is a key concern in America and other democracies. Although past evidence suggests some ways to minimize it, there are no easily applicable interventions that have been found to work in the increasingly polarized climate. This project examines whether irrelevant factors, or incidental happiness more specifically, have the power to reduce affective polarization (i.e., misattribution of affect or “carryover effect”). On the flip side, happiness can minimize systematic processing, thus enhancing beliefs in conspiracy theories and impeding individual ability to recognize deep fakes. Three preregistered survey experiments in the US, Poland, and the Netherlands (total N = 3611) induced happiness in three distinct ways. Happiness had no effects on affective polarization toward political outgroups and hostility toward various divisive social groups, and also on endorsement of conspiracy theories and beliefs that a deep fake was real. Two additional studies in the US and Poland (total N = 2220), also induced anger and anxiety, confirming that all these incidental emotions had null effects. These findings, which emerged uniformly in three different countries, among different partisan and ideological groups, and for those for whom the inductions were differently effective, underscore the stability of outgroup attitudes in contemporary America and other countries. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11109-021-09701-1. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8550506 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2021 |
publisher | Springer US |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-85505062021-10-29 The (Null) Effects of Happiness on Affective Polarization, Conspiracy Endorsement, and Deep Fake Recognition: Evidence from Five Survey Experiments in Three Countries Yu, Xudong Wojcieszak, Magdalena Lee, Seungsu Casas, Andreu Azrout, Rachid Gackowski, Tomasz Polit Behav Original Paper Affective polarization is a key concern in America and other democracies. Although past evidence suggests some ways to minimize it, there are no easily applicable interventions that have been found to work in the increasingly polarized climate. This project examines whether irrelevant factors, or incidental happiness more specifically, have the power to reduce affective polarization (i.e., misattribution of affect or “carryover effect”). On the flip side, happiness can minimize systematic processing, thus enhancing beliefs in conspiracy theories and impeding individual ability to recognize deep fakes. Three preregistered survey experiments in the US, Poland, and the Netherlands (total N = 3611) induced happiness in three distinct ways. Happiness had no effects on affective polarization toward political outgroups and hostility toward various divisive social groups, and also on endorsement of conspiracy theories and beliefs that a deep fake was real. Two additional studies in the US and Poland (total N = 2220), also induced anger and anxiety, confirming that all these incidental emotions had null effects. These findings, which emerged uniformly in three different countries, among different partisan and ideological groups, and for those for whom the inductions were differently effective, underscore the stability of outgroup attitudes in contemporary America and other countries. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11109-021-09701-1. Springer US 2021-03-18 2021 /pmc/articles/PMC8550506/ /pubmed/34720307 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11109-021-09701-1 Text en © The Author(s) 2021, corrected publication 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . |
spellingShingle | Original Paper Yu, Xudong Wojcieszak, Magdalena Lee, Seungsu Casas, Andreu Azrout, Rachid Gackowski, Tomasz The (Null) Effects of Happiness on Affective Polarization, Conspiracy Endorsement, and Deep Fake Recognition: Evidence from Five Survey Experiments in Three Countries |
title | The (Null) Effects of Happiness on Affective Polarization, Conspiracy Endorsement, and Deep Fake Recognition: Evidence from Five Survey Experiments in Three Countries |
title_full | The (Null) Effects of Happiness on Affective Polarization, Conspiracy Endorsement, and Deep Fake Recognition: Evidence from Five Survey Experiments in Three Countries |
title_fullStr | The (Null) Effects of Happiness on Affective Polarization, Conspiracy Endorsement, and Deep Fake Recognition: Evidence from Five Survey Experiments in Three Countries |
title_full_unstemmed | The (Null) Effects of Happiness on Affective Polarization, Conspiracy Endorsement, and Deep Fake Recognition: Evidence from Five Survey Experiments in Three Countries |
title_short | The (Null) Effects of Happiness on Affective Polarization, Conspiracy Endorsement, and Deep Fake Recognition: Evidence from Five Survey Experiments in Three Countries |
title_sort | (null) effects of happiness on affective polarization, conspiracy endorsement, and deep fake recognition: evidence from five survey experiments in three countries |
topic | Original Paper |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8550506/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34720307 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11109-021-09701-1 |
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