Do emotion and emotional and social contagion lead to people fighting democracy?
We need to recognize the importance of emotional contagion in influencing and dominating the public and political dialogue. If we don’t recognize it, then we can’t control it, influence it or regulate it. We pride ourselves in being rational, but in fact our public and political discourse in democracy is dominated by emotionality and the effects of emotional contagion.
As there seems to be a sparsity of emotional closeness in recent years in society, people are feeling the effects of this. They seem to be clamoring for more emotional support without realizing it. Emotional closeness and trust do not just seem to be a nice thing, they seem to be essential for well-being in a society or a country. Political figures do not seem to realize this, and those who do seem to use it against us. People are looking for their emotional fix from elsewhere when it is lacking from their friends and family, and have been known to run to sports and entertainment stars for their emotional fix. More recently, however in the last 15 year or more, during and following the election of Barack Obama as U.S. President, people have turned to political figures who give the appearance of being strong for their emotional support. This continued with the election of Donald Trump, albeit from a different segment of the population. Trump’s election brought into play the need for some people to have authoritarian figures become their leaders.
Emotional contagion refers to effects that occur in life when people unwittingly take on or absorb emotions as expressed, emanated, exuded or emitted by others. It often happens without the person’s conscious realization. It occurs in many areas of life, but is predominant in intimate, family, social and interpersonal arenas such as politics. This happens in crowds, including political rallies and sports events. We usually take in or absorb an emotion coming from others, subconsciously, as it spreads through emotional and social contagion. It has been referred to as universal or pervasive, affecting most people, especially those who are not inoculated, who receive it, in one way or another. People are often unaware of it or take it for granted.
In my first book, Emotions Don’t Think: Emotional Contagion in a Time of Turmoil, published in 2021, I explained how contagious toxic emotions spread simple messages throughout society, dominating the political dialogue, in the media and among the public at large. The dialogue becomes emotional, heightened and dramatic. People become divided because of the great power of emotion embedded in the message of the dialogue. Emotions sneak by the critical, reasoning mind of many susceptible people at this time and explain Trump’s appeal to voters. Emotions can express simple judgmental messages. Trump and others do this and affect people this way. When he became President in 2017 people quickly caught his dark feelings of anger, cynicism and gloom.
This trend has continued and become stronger lately. Trump, following the insurrection attempt of January 6, 2021, which was fueled by out-of-control aggressive and destructive emotion, has influenced and steered the direction of politics well into the emotional area. Politics, however, is designed for the rational area. Being well-informed requires knowledge of facts and figures, using data and logical descriptors of cause and effect. This should be an essential asset when contributing to political and social dialogue. But we have come to the point where emotion runs so strong in political debates in the Western world that it takes over our political discourse. Facts, figures and general knowledge are forgotten or distorted to meet the emotional needs of people. When emotion takes over political discourse, it seems to be contributing to the slow demise of democracy. Many of us become emotionally involved, because we tend to take political statements personally, in a realm where emotion dominates.
This involves implicit emotion, where an underlying emotional basis is used as a reason to take political positions. This often involves a collective subconscious, where ideas running strong in the undercurrent of modern society hang around, oscillating and reverberating in our subconscious, until they grab enough strength by connecting with emerging social and political movements. This happened when the white nationalists, likely feeling suppressed, disregarded and ignored after Obama’s two elections, gathered in Charlottesville and marched, directed by their innermost emotions, inciting anger and aggression and expressing various verbal slogans. Emotion has been shown in psychological research to be emitted by the voice, and emotions can emerge and become inherent in slogans.
Political parties and advocacy groups need slogans to be viable and hire advertising and marketing agencies to sell their positions. These agencies and groups use emotion to appeal to their target audience to agree with their position on political and social issues. Their slogans may rhyme and be pleasing to the ear. In this way, emotions can be absorbed into the psyche. As well, in the days of the internet, people read lengthy articles less so and respond more to spoken headlines on video sources expressing drama and conflict, which elicit fear, aggression and other aroused emotions. Newspapers and magazine articles also do this, but likely to a smaller extent than audio. We end up in a situation where we vote on factors which touch our feelings and emotions more than facts.
Independent and undecided voters now tend to vote against something or someone rather than for a person, stand or party. So we have situations such as Brexit, where people seemed to vote on the basis of pride in their country, feelings of nationalism, and the underlying fear of domination or even annihilation by Europe, all of which are strong emotional factors appealing to the need for survival. Typically, the emotion subsides with time, as we see now among Britons who seem to regret their decision to support Brexit. Using reason, knowledge and logic about factors related to rational economic decisions and the benefits of free trade to challenge protectionism and national isolation would have been better, so that free movements of materials could strengthen the country’s economy.
Voters are basically deciding more on factors enhanced by emotion and poetic effects than policy. They seem to need emotional effects from politicians and policies more than they used to ages ago. We seem to have to feel good about our vote and about the person we are voting for. They have to resonate inside us, the candidate’s personality, their voices and their ideas, so in a sense when their position flows like poetry it easily connects inside us and touches what we may feel we neglect emotionally in regard to emotional fulfillment even if it doesn’t make for good policy and in doing so elicits our vote.
So when Trump speaks in a loud voice and Biden speaks in a soft voice, often reflecting his personality, people who think emotionally pick up Trump’s ideas in his voice and ignore the lack of logic, facts, figures supporting his arguments and support him based on the heightened emotion involved in his loud voice and short sentence fragments.
Emotional contagion is a little-known phenomenon where emotions easily transfer from one person or group to another. It is thought that it may occur through mirror neurons, in which we easily pick up and absorb emotions portrayed by others. Psychologically, though, it has to be that we have a personal affinity for the emotion being expressed in order to absorb it or be affected by it. We don’t absorb hate unless we have some repressed hostility that can be released when a powerful figure like Trump triggers it off within us by appearing to side with us in our repressed issues, by tapping into an emotional need we may have suppressed, such as an emotional need for recognition and what we psychologists call validation, seen through a defense mechanism such as projection.
For example, when some people see a minority group being given privileges that they perceive they do not get, they perceive their emotional need or personal need as being ignored, when others perceived as more fringe in society may seem to have their needs met. Then they get hurt, feel ignored, and could get angry. Whether refugees or a number of various minority groups, no matter if their basis for relegation to the minority status is being given because of race, nationality, religion, gender or other factors, these perceived privileges produce a form of jealousy that is converted into hatred of those groups who are perceived to be favored for factors other than merit, in comparison to the person not getting certain these types of privileges. Hence, we get racism and bigotry, which use emotional thinking at the roots of their thoughts.
Consequently, the forces that seem to be white nationalist and anti-democratic are leading with their emotions, which reflect the force of their collective subconscious they have felt for a long time, related likely to feelings of despair, depression and helplessness involved in their lack of empowerment. Until people’s emotional needs are recognized by those in power, politicians and capitalists, in a benevolent way, and taken into account, the expressed emotions from the downtrodden will continue to be heard loud and clear as they have been in recent years, but not in a good way. It is time to recognize the hidden force that emotions carry, and recognize, validate their related beliefs, as without this they may end up destroying democracy.