Donald Trump’s angry rhetoric won him supporters during the 2016 U.S. presidential race.Carlo Allegri/The Globe and Mail
The Globe's bimonthly report on research from business schools.
Keri Kettle has a message to marketers: Don't underestimate the role that our emotional state in any particular moment plays in shaping our everyday decisions.
"We like to believe that people are generally rational, but a growing body of research suggests that they're not," he says in an e-mail.
The observation is drawn from the findings of a new study by Dr. Kettle, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Manitoba's Asper School of Business in Winnipeg, that examines the connection between voters' emotional state and how that influences their support for liberal or conservative ideologies.
The research is published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
Dr. Kettle and co-author Anthony Salerno of the University of Cincinnati focused their research on voters in the United States. Living in Miami during the 2012 U.S. presidential campaign, Dr. Kettle was particularly curious as to why people who identified themselves as Republicans seemed angrier than Democrats.
Testing a number of theories, the researchers determined that voters don't necessarily make decisions based on rational thinking and careful consideration of the candidates and platforms. Rather, the research suggests that how voters feel at the moment they are casting their ballot plays an important role in the outcome.
The study suggests feelings of anger are particularly powerful at the polls.
"Anger is an emotion that results from the belief that somebody else has caused you harm," says Dr. Kettle. Critically, experiencing anger also leads people to become more competitive. Competitiveness, in turn, spurs other behaviours, such as a stronger sense of economic conservatism driven by a belief that resources are scarce and a decreased willingness to share those resources (values that adhere to a more conservative ideology).
Political strategists certainly aren't blind to this connect, says Dr. Kettle, noting that anger was central to Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.
"His [Trump's] message was to blame others for America's woes … and, as we saw last November [2016], it led to a groundswell of support."
Dr. Kettle says voters in lower income brackets – many of whom swung in favour of Mr. Trump in the 2016 election – are particularly vulnerable to being politically swayed by anger.
"Who perceives resources to be scarce? Not the wealthy," he says.
(This month's Alabama Senate election had a similar environment, as Republican candidate Roy Moore's campaign featured angry attacks against rival Democrats and the media, among others. However, the anger didn't lead to a Republican victory this time, owing in part to Mr. Moore's alleged sexual abuse of teenage girls earlier in his legal career. He narrowly lost to Democrat Doug Jones.)
Dr. Kettle believes the same kind of political manoeuvring could happen in Canada.
"Canadian elections tend to not have the same level of rhetoric as American elections, but moving forward we should pay attention to whether our candidates are seeking to elicit anger – or any other emotions – amongst voters," he says.
He says the study does not suggest that voters' emotions will cause large swaths of the electorate to change their votes.
"But it doesn't need to. Many elections are determined by less than 5 per cent of the vote and some races come down to less than 1 per cent of the vote. If you can predictably swing that 1 per cent by affecting their emotional state, you can change the outcome of the election."
Story ideas related to business school research in Canada can be sent to darahkristine@gmail.com.