Touching the base: heart-warming ads from the 2016 U.S. election moved viewers to partisan tears

ABSTRACT

Some political ads used in the 2016 U.S. election evoked feelings colloquially known as being moved to tears. We conceptualise this phenomenon as a positive social emotion that appraises and motivates communal relations, is accompanied by physical sensations (including lachrymation, piloerection, chest warmth), and often labelled metaphorically. We surveyed U.S. voters in the fortnight before the 2016 U.S. election. Selected ads evoked the emotion completely and reliably, but in a partisan fashion: Clinton voters were moved to tears by three selected Clinton ads, and Trump voters were moved to tears by two Trump ads. Viewers were much less moved by ads of the candidate they did not support. Being moved to tears predicted intention to vote for the candidate depicted. We conclude that some contemporary political advertising is able to move its audience to tears, and thereby motivates support.

KEYWORDS:

• Political ads
• voting
• being moved
• kama muta
• crying
• 2016 presidential election

Acknowledgement

We thank Nikolai Czajkowski and Torleif Halkjelsvik for helpful feedback on the analyses, Johanna Blomster for helpful discussions and the students of PSY3102 Fall 2016 for great discussions and input.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Beate Seibt http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0148-0961

Thomas W. Schubert http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3797-4568

Janis H. Zickfeld http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7660-2719

Alan P. Fiske http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0506-2134

Notes

1. One could be interested in how such voters were swayed by the ads for Clinton and Trump, but we were not for the present set of hypotheses. Note also that there were only few such participants. The data are available for others to analyze.

2. At the end, participants could leave comments; those ranged from “Oh my goodness that Obama clip had me SOBBING! Best president EVER!” to “There should have been a trigger warning on that disgusting sodomite video.”

3. We used the same Trump ads as in Study 1 because we could not find new ads that seemed to evoke strong kama muta. The ad “Donald Trump's Argument for America” would have been a suitable candidate, but it was published only after we conducted Study 2.

4. However, we included one item on anger and found independent effects of anger and feeling moved on motivation to support the advertised candidate in Study 1, see Supplemental Material.

5. The Nation, WNYCStudios (2016). United States of Anxiety, Episode 2. 29 September 2016. http://www.wnyc.org/story/united-states-of-anxiety-podcast-episode-2. In fact, this episode inspired the current work.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by an internal research grant from the Department of Psychology, University of Oslo.