The prevalence of politicians making rude comments against their detractors has become so widespread that we may not even take notice. This is the issue of political incivility, according to new research from Rotman, which shows that while incivility may help to grab attention, it may ultimately result in us taking less interest in what the politicians have to say.
On the rise
According to the researchers, incivility has been increasing, especially on the internet. In their latest study, they found that when former U.S. President Donald Trump and current President Joe Biden used rude and demeaning language on social media, they gained fewer followers.
The researchers analyzed over 32,000 tweets from Trump’s account and more than 7,000 tweets from Biden’s account. Using a machine learning program to detect toxic speech, they found that when Trump and Biden were particularly uncivil, they gained fewer followers compared to when they were civil. Trump’s biggest follower growth occurred after civil tweets, while Biden gained the most followers after his most civil tweets.
The researchers believe that the steep drop in new followers for Biden is perhaps because people tend to expect him to behave better than they do Trump. Despite this, they believe that Trump’s general incivility may have resulted in him losing around 6.3 million followers.
Two experimental studies, with a total of 2,000 participants, that were part of the research confirmed that political incivility leads to decreased interest over time, even if the participant aligned with the same political party. This was surprising, according to the researchers. A third study found that moral disapproval of a politician’s remarks had a greater impact on a person’s continued interest than the attention-grabbing nature of the politician’s words.
Why do politicians continue to engage in aggressive rhetoric toward one another despite these findings? The researchers believe it could be due to the potential damage they could inflict on their opponents’ reputations or their aim to discourage voters from going to the polls. Alternatively, they suggest that “maybe they’re just wrong”.
