Feeling-Into the Civic Body: Affect, Emotions and Moods

Springer eBooks, 2022

Emotion plays a vital role in modern societies, especially given circulation of knowingly and unwittingly spread false information. This book assesses how this has come to be, how we should understand it, why it matters, what comes next and what we should do about it. We start with three observations. Firstly, false information is prevalent online and causes real-world civic harms. Multiple concepts associated with false information achieved linguistic prominence across the early twenty-first century, indicating the scale of the problem. In 2006, 'truthiness' was Word of the Year for Merriam-Webster: it refers to 'a truthful or seemingly truthful quality that is claimed for something not because of supporting facts or evidence but because of a feeling that it is true or a desire for it to be true' (Merriam-Webster, 2020). A decade later, 'post-truth' became Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year, defined as, 'relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief' (Oxford Dictionaries, 2016). By 2017, a year after Donald Trump became US president, 'fake news' was word of the year for Collins' English dictionary, defined as 'false, often sensational, information disseminated under the guise of news reporting' (Collins English Dictionary, 2017). In 2018, 'misinformation' was Dictionary.com's word of the year, namely: 'false information that is

Springer eBooks, 2022

Emotions and society, 2022

In this paper, I consider emotional reactions in response to political facts, and I investigate how they may provide relevant knowledge about those facts. I assess the value of such knowledge, both from an epistemic and a political perspective. Concerning the epistemic part, I argue that, although emotions are not in themselves sufficient to ground evaluative knowledge about political facts, they can do so within a network of further coherent epistemic attitudes about those facts. With regards to the political part, I argue that the contribution of emotions to evaluative knowledge about political facts, is indeed politically valuable. To develop my argument, I show first that an evaluative kind of knowledge is relevant for reaching a sophisticated level of political cognition, and second that emotions contribute distinctively to this kind of knowledge. I conclude that, when emotional experiences towards political events are coupled with an adequate factual knowledge about those events, they can ground a distinctive evaluative knowledge about those events, and such knowledge is relevant both from an epistemic and a political perspective.

Emotions and Society, 2020

This article seeks to explore and emphasise the role of emotions as a key variable in terms of understanding both the rise of anti-political sentiment and its manifestation in forms of ethno-populism. It argues that the changing emotional landscape has generally been overlooked in analyses that seek to comprehend contemporary social and political change. This argument matters, not only due to the manner in which it challenges dominant interpretations of the populist signal but also because it poses more basic questions about the limits of knowledge and evidential claims in an increasingly polarised, fractious and emotive contemporary context. The core argument concerning the existence of an emotional disconnection and why ‘feelings trump facts’ is therefore as significant for social and political scientists as it is for politicians and policy makers.

The role of emotions in politics, 2018

In recounting historic future-defining events of the French Revolution, World Wars, or even contemporary developments of the Trump campaign and Brexit, one cannot help but notice a persistent, intense presence of emotions during the evolution of worldwide politics. As “guests who were invited late to the banquet of history” (Nagy and Boquet, 2008, p.16) emotions have been traditionally under-appreciated often unrecognised in political thought, even though components of the universal political toolbox including strategic communication, the nomic nexus, and complex power relations all either subconsciously encompassing or relying upon their intricate mechanics. Theories of dissonant duality between emotions and rationality have been echoed by early thinkers- Plato’s pessimism regarding humans as irrational beings bearing egoistic passions declares fear of punishment as necessary for obedience (1969, 359a); Aristotle’s notion of the virtuous citizen is one who’s rational assessments and emotional responses “speak with the same voice” (1984, p.14). Even though the scepticism regarding emotion-influenced decision making in politics has become a prominent cliché, in addressing the question of why pluralist democracies have been able to strive and succeed over past failed systems scholars asserted it is precisely due to their unique ability to manage social emotions, and to use them wisely without suffocation (Kiss, 2013, p.15) (Braud, 1991). Consonant views add that harmony in pluralism in fact depends on the cultivation of some emotions and outlawing others shaping patterns of action: such a system being central to the actualisation of a standard of equality as coercion alone would fail to succeed (James, 2006, p.232). The following essay will seek to assess relations of politics and emotion, contending that not only can passions aid the maintenance of a peaceful civil discourse, they also fuel the engine of social change. In contrast I hypothesise that while a cognitive component of emotions may allow for restraint and cultivation to burgeon social progress, it can also be exploited to mislead or manipulate by the state, thus caution must be exercised and vulnerabilities addressed through education, and the independence of channels able to influence cognition.

Annual Review of Political Science

The study of emotion in politics has been active, especially as it relates to the personality of political leaders and as an explanation for how people evaluate significant features around them. Researchers have been divided into two groups-those who study leaders and those who study publics. The research programs have also been divided between those who use emotion to explain reliance on early experience that dominates contemporary judgment and those who use emotion to explain why people respond to the immediate contemporary circumstances around them. More recently, theory and research have attempted to reconcile these two seemingly contradictory roles by integrating them. Emotion's role in politics is pervasive both because emotion enables past experience to be encoded with its evaluative history and because emotion enables contemporary circumstances to be quickly evaluated. More recently still, theoretical models and supporting evidence suggest that there are multiple channels of emotional evaluations.

Media Studies Futures

Optimising Emotions, Incubating Falsehoods

We have established that false information online harms the civic body, driven by the economics of emotion and the politics of emotion. What should be done about this? Multi-stakeholder solutions have been proffered by various countries’ governmental inquiries into disinformation and fake news, and by supranational bodies including the United Nations, European Union and Commonwealth. This chapter assesses seven solution areas: namely, (1) coercive and non-coercive government action, (2) cybersecurity, (3) digital intermediaries/platforms, (4) advertisers, (5) professional political persuaders and public relations, (6) media organisations and (7) education. As well as being intrinsically difficult areas to solve individually, let alone in concert, the chapter concludes that such solutions merely tinker at the edges as they do not address a fundamental incubator for false information online: namely, the business model for social media platforms built on the economics of emotion.