The Affect and Effect of Images of War on Individual Opinion and Emotions

ABSTRACT

We explore the conditions under which individuals are attentive to positive and negative battlefield information when forming beliefs about a conflict’s success or failure. We use three experiments to explore the impact of visual and textual battlefield cues on individuals’ emotional states and attitudes toward the war in Afghanistan. We find that both visual and textual information convey information about failure that influences public attitudes and emotions toward war. In keeping with rational expectations theory, but contrary to widespread beliefs within the journalistic and policymaking communities, textual cues and images of battlefield failure have similar effects on emotions and attitudes. The consistency of multiple war cues, however, greatly affects peoples’ reactions. Simply put, in war the content of information matters, not its delivery style.

KEYWORDS:

• Conflict
• foreign policy
• public opinion

Notes

¹ Study I Winter 2010, Study II Winter 2011, and Study III Winter 2012. Participation was voluntary and incentivized through extra credit.

² Visual and textual treatments are available from the authors.

³ Analyses conducted in Stata© 13.

⁴ For all figures, red represents the percent of subjects receiving losing and blue winning information treatment conditions.

⁵ Our results are robust to various ways of coding prior beliefs. Splitting the sample at the middle of the scale (value 5) or interacting the treatments with the pretreatment attitudes yielded similar results.

⁶ We do not address television footage, which may have greater effect on opinion than photos (Pfau, Haigh, Shannon, Tones, Mercurio, Williams, Binstock, Diaz, Dillard, Browne, Elder, Reed, Eggers, and Melendez 2008).