Theresa May is fighting an unrelenting tide of negative public opinion that she appears defenceless against. And it seems predicated on a lack of emotion and moral standing that the opposition, by contrast, is busy demonstrating at every opportunity, whether through public policy on health and social care, or on the front line.
Read more: Emotional and authentic: how Labour won the internet
A study, penned by members of New York University’s Department of Psychology, suggests that these two factors, emotion and morality, are linked to the “virality” of content on social media. And this could be the key to winning future elections online.
Pre-election, May refused to take part in televised debates of all the major parties, arguing she was too busy canvassing, meeting voters, and preparing for Brexit. Tim Farron had a dig during the debate saying: "She can't be bothered. So why should you?” – and the sentiment was shared by many. But May managed to survive, with an air of quiet importance that said: “it might not seem like my party is strong and stable, but my steely resolve certainly is.” That much-derided motto and stance has been the foundations of her party’s survival. The Conservatives got us through the tough times post-recession, and will see us through this one (erm, of its own making). Then came the election result. Then came Grenfell.
“She is not one of those people who perhaps shows emotion as openly as some of us do,” MP for Bromley and Chislehurst Bob Neill, said, by way of defence, after May was publicly criticised for failing to meet residents of the Grenfell tragedy. Leader of the opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, conversely was praised for not only meeting residents, but openly comforting them.
Emotion, it seems, is in dire shortage, and at the worst of times, the public wants to see it from the nation's leadership.
In the US, president Trump’s continued efforts to keep his campaign promise and throw out Obamacare saw him – in response to widespread negative reception of the proposed replacement health bill – characterise it as “mean”, claiming: “I speak from the heart, that’s what I want to see. I want to see a bill with heart." Social media-loving Trump knows that perception is important to survival; he’s read the public’s reaction, and is reacting in accordance, characterising himself as the emotional big softie who wants to make everyone’s lives better, no matter how that contradicts reality.
“Young voters are highly engaged on social media and they are shaping the conversation and political events in real time,” Jay Van Bavel, an associate professor in NYU’s Department of Psychology and co-author on the study, tells WIRED. “I would not be surprised if this is how the next generation of voters are going to engage with issues and coordinate political action."
Van Bavel and his team selected three “polarising” topics - same-sex marriage, climate change, and gun rights - and sourced 563,312 relevant tweets to look for correlations between types of language, and the tweets' chance of spreading wider and further.
“We were originally interested in trying to understand how morality spreads,” he explains. “There are countless studies on the psychology underlying moral judgment but very little research examining exactly how it spreads. It also seems obvious that social media is how people engage with moral issues these days. This is why we wanted to study how moral information spreads on Twitter.”
The premise, as explained in the paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week, is that: “Our moods, thoughts, and actions are shaped by the entire network of individuals with whom we share direct and indirect relationships. Thus, we often develop similar ideas and intuitions as others because we are socially connected to them.” The team wanted to see if this “social contagion”, was impacted when morality was brought into the mix, specifically when it comes to political issues shared on social media.
Van Bavel points out that more than 1 billion people use social media every day (Facebook recently declared it has a staggering 2 billion users), many of whom will use it to learn about the news or political debates of the day. “Using social media is a major issue and has led to concerns about echo chambers, fake news and political polarisation. This is why we desperately need more scientists to tackle these issues and better understand how people are using social media."
The team devised an algorithm that would categorise tweets according to a user’s political ideology, in order to compare how far the sentiments travelled within and beyond groups. “The ideology estimates of this algorithm are nearly perfectly correlated with the actual voting behaviour of US members of congress and can correctly classify normal users as Democrats or Republicans with 78 per cent accuracy,” Van Bavel attested.
The study took the aforementioned divisive issues and measured how moral language (justice, shield, protect), emotional language (appreciate, hopeful, pleasing), and moral-emotional language (abandon, dishonest, sinister) impacted how they spread through the network. They found, time and again, that moral-emotional language had a significant impact on how far a message spread: when it came to gun control, “adding a single moral-emotional word to a given tweet increased its expected retweet rate by 19 per cent”. For same-sex marriage, this figure was 17 per cent, and for climate change it was 24 per cent. The impact was far greater than if a message’s content was solely moral, or emotional. This impact was largely only prevalent within political groups, however.
“There were certainly lots of tweets that ‘broke the echo chamber’ and were passed along by the other side of the political spectrum,” says Van Bavel. “But, on average, people tend to share moral emotions that come from their own side. A number of psychologists believe that morality binds groups together and our research seems to bear this out.”
So the tool – because of course, this knowledge will be used as a tool – is really only useful when campaigning within a party or among undecided voters. It is, essentially, a recipe for peak echo chamber virality. And politicians already seem savvy to it.
“In his first interview after winning the US presidential election, Donald Trump famously said: ‘I really believe that the fact that I have such power in terms of numbers with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etcetera – I think it helped me win all of these races where they’re spending much more money than I spent.’” Van Bavel points out that “it's not clear from our studies if political parties were specifically aware of the power of moral emotion, but enough of them use this kind of tribal language online that they may have an intuition that it helps animate their supporters.”
“This research can certainly be used to manipulate people for political purposes, but that doesn't need to be the case. I can imagine social activists, marketers, or even scientists using these insights to bring positive outcomes to the world.”
The team’s research is only just getting started. The team plans on narrowing in on politicians to see how much they have adopted this tactic already, and whether the findings are replicated on Facebook. “We are also conducting experiments in the lab to see if these effects are causal, rather than simply correlational,” says Van Bavel. "In other research, we are trying to better understand the psychology and neuroscience behind the spread of fake news and how we can make people better consumers of social media.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
