The Psychology of Public Reactions to Political Communication

The technological changes and political events of recent years have generated much debate about political communication and where it leaves the health of democratic politics. There are concerns about whether politicians are telling citizens the truth or distracting them from it, and about whether citizens can handle the cognitive and emotional complexity of the political world that they face. Policymakers have sought to restrain the spread of so-called fake news, to buffer the effects of online incivility, and to boost citizen compliance amid the anxiety and uncertainty of the pandemic. In this dissertation, I argue that their limited success is due in part to a limited and sometimes crude understanding of public reactions to political information and communication. Key to this is the role of emotion. As psychologists have long established, emotion is ubiquitous in human reasoning and often unconscious feelings shape attitudes and decision-making. At the same time, this interplays with cognition rather than overriding it in the way that those cruder models of a ‘post-truth’ public suggest. I examine this interplay in a series of papers, exploring public reactions to political communication in different contexts and using different methodological strategies. This dissertation contributes to existing research in three ways: by producing new observational and experimental datasets; by piloting innovations in experimental design; and by generating insights useful to both academic and policy audiences. At the heart of several of these is the concept of incivility. I demonstrate how breaking the norms of political communication helps challenger parties to propagate their messages and the media to propagate disinformation.