“I’m a Human Being, Dammit!” - Identity, Online Partisan Media, Emotional Arousal, and Incivility-Seeking Behavior

Orion Arthur Yoesle

doi:10.7273/000004980

Incivility continues to increase in American society, especially with respect to politics. Many scholars, political elites, and citizens grow increasingly concerned over its detrimental effects on political discourse, information exposure, and the ability of our government to function. However, there is still much we do not understand about incivility. In my dissertation I focus on several critical factors related to political incivility – where online political incivility originates, how we perceive and emotionally respond to this incivility, and factors that dictate our engagement and dissemination of incivility in politics. I ask several questions about these factors: how common is political incivility in online blogs, and what does that incivility look like? How does our sense of identity affect how we perceive and emotionally react to uncivil political content? What individual characteristics predict engagement with uncivil political content? I use a mixed methods approach to address these components of incivility. First, I conduct a content analysis to examine the variety and extent of incivility, group appeals, and emotional appeals in selected partisan internet media outlets and mainstream news outlets. Second, I conduct two survey experiments from which I derive predictions about how we interact with incivility. The first experiment draws from Affective Intelligence Theory, Social Identity Theory, and empirical examinations of emotional responses to political stimuli to asses how we perceive incivility and emotionally respond to it. The second experiment considers Social Identity Theory and research on opinion leadership to test what individual-level factors may predict further engagement with uncivil content, as well as evaluations of its credibility. This research reveals that partisan online media outlets rely heavily on incivility and associated emotional appeals to our personal identities. Further, this project demonstrates that our sense of identity strongly conditions our emotional response to uncivil content. Finally, individual traits associated with opinion leadership strongly predict engagement with uncivil content. This is a critical finding, as it provides insight into how incivility might spread via social circles and online acquaintances at the mass level. Overall, I conclude that if incivility remains as serious a problem as thought, it is not likely to go away any time soon. Further, to the extent that incivility has been used for normatively positive goals, like fighting for rights and liberties or to overcome political oppression, this “positive” incivility threatens to be drowned out by the overwhelming pervasiveness of negative incivility. This possibility, as well as the link between online incivility and dissemination via opinion leaders, open up promising new avenues for researchers to better understand how incivility spread among the mass public, and the effects such a spread might have on our society.

“I’m a Human Being, Dammit!” - Identity, Online Partisan Media, Emotional Arousal, and Incivility-Seeking Behavior

Files and links (1)

Abstract

Metrics

Details