Research: Does Conservative Negativism
Repress Rational Thought?
Conservatives are fond of identifying “enemies” and using
strong negative words and images to describe them. I wrote about this in the
essay Conservatives Depending on Emotional Words to Persuade where
excerpts of a GOP memo from Newt Gingrich suggest words to describe “our
opponents” including: failure, pathetic, lie, liberal, betray, hypocrisy,
radical, etc.
Psychologists have already discovered that emotions affect
higher brain functions including attention, memory, vision and motor control.
Now, researchers are discovering that negative language inhibits the lower
level retrieval of knowledge and subconscious information processing. A Bangor
University study initially expected that negative emotional words would be
arousing and stimulate reasoning capacity. Instead, they found that negative
words suppressed certain cognitive responses.
I suggest that combining these two observations may show
that repeatedly describing liberals [or another race, or immigrants, or
non-believers] in negative terms may reduce the audiences’ ability to reason
critically about the information they are receiving.
