The person in political emotion

The Person in Political Emotion Colin Wayne Leach University of Connecticut ABSTRACT Recent social psychological theory and research on political issues has returned to once-popular concepts such as political emotion and ideology Strikingly, however, this work tends to avoid the notion of personality and explicit reference to individual differences For example, the numerous studies that examine correlations between political beliefs, feelings, and preferences rarely acknowledge that such associations show an ideological coherence in individuals Instead, correlations between abstract constructs are interpreted as suggesting causal processes Individuals, and their responses, are aggregated to generate such correlations but remain for the most part unexamined and unmentioned I discuss practices in research and reporting that make it difficult to find the person in correlational models of political emotion I use my own research to illustrate these practices and to show how attention to macrolevel forces such as group membership, status, and structure may be integrated with attention to the individual person and meaningful aggregates Politics are an important part of people’s lives When something important to us is ‘‘at stake’’ in a political issue or event, we determine its evaluative meaning for us This evaluative meaning is emotion (Arnold, 1960; Lazarus, 1991; Lutz & Abu-Lughod, 1990) To see someone angry about the government rescue of financial institutions, or to see someone fearful that his or her party will lose an election, is to see people imbue the political with a particular meaning Anger and fear in these instances are the lived experience of politics in people’s lives (Leach & Tiedens, 2004) I would like to thank Eileen Zurbriggen, Nicolay Gausel, Valerie Earnshaw, Aarti Iyer, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on previous drafts of this article Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Colin Wayne Leach, Department of Psychology, University of Connecticut, 406 Babbidge Road, U-1020, Storrs, CT 06269-1020 Email: Colin.Leach@uconn.edu Journal of Personality 78:6, December 2010 r 2010 The Author Journal of Personality r 2010, Wiley Periodicals, Inc DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-6494.2010.00671.x 1828 Leach Understanding the subjective meaning of politics in people’s lives is important partly because meaning is closely linked to motivation (Arnold, 1960; Lazarus, 1991) The meaning that people give political events and issues orients them to the goals that best fit that meaning As anger about government rescue of financial institutions implies that one sees it as an offense to help undeserving or otherwise immoral institutions, it follows that one is likely to have opposition to such efforts as a goal It is the meaning and the motivation suggested by emotion that have made its study increasingly important in the study of politics in fields such as anthropology (e.g., Lutz & Abu-Lughod, 1990), political science (e.g., Goodwin, Jasper, & Polletta, 2001), and sociology (e.g., Kemper, 1990) For these same reasons, psychologists—who have long viewed emotion as a core concept—have come to view emotion as important to analyses of people’s social and political thought and action (for reviews, see Mackie & Smith, 2002; Parkinson, Fischer, & Manstead, 2005; Tiedens & Leach, 2004) My own work in social psychology has used the emotion concept to examine the evaluative meaning that individuals give their identity and morality in the context of unequal status relations Thus, with van Zomeren, Spears, and Fischer, I have examined students’ anger at the prospect of having universities unfairly raise their tuition (van Zomeren, Spears, Fischer, & Leach, 2004; van Zomeren, Spears, & Leach, 2008) With Iyer, Pedersen, and others, I have examined the anger, guilt, sympathy, and (sometimes) pride that members of structurally advantaged groups can feel about their position relative to worse off groups (Harth, Kessler, & Leach, 2008; Leach, Iyer, & Pedersen, 2006, 2007) And with Spears and others, I have examined the pain that individuals can feel about their group’s inferiority in a domain and the satisfaction that results from this pain of inferiority when a rival fails in this same domain (Leach & Spears, 2008, 2009; Leach, Spears, Branscombe, & Doosje, 2003) Like most social psychologists, my work tends to avoid avowed examination of individual differences or direct reference to the concept of personality Yet it is quite clear that the examination of individual differences is part and parcel of my research After all, I design experimental manipulations aimed at moving a particular sample of participants on an issue that they care about; I ‘‘control for’’ individual differences in political ideology or degree of identification with relevant groups; and I examine models that use the correlations between measures of individual difference to The Person in Political Emotion 1829 make inferences about the structure and the process of political emotion Partly because it relies on correlations between individual differences, my research on political emotion can be easily interpreted as examining (political) personality The assessment of intercorrelations between belief, emotions, and motivations regarding these issues is suggestive of a coherence of belief, feeling, and motivation within individuals Yet, like most social psychologists, I avoid drawing such inferences I think that the avoidance of the person in political emotion comes from at least two trends in social psychology First, social psychologists tend to treat experiments as rendering the person unimportant to the phenomenon under study Second, we tend to treat correlational models as if they were experiments The first trend is well known (to personality psychologists; for general discussions, see Allport, 1968; Cronbach, 1957; Kenrick & Funder, 1988; Krueger, 2009) The second trend is less well known and more surprising because the use of correlational models is often thought to imply interest in individuals (see Cronbach, 1957) After briefly reviewing social psychological work on emotion regarding political issues and events, I discuss the two trends that contribute to the relative absence of the person in political emotion By identifying some rhetorical, methodological, and theoretical explanations for these trends, I aim to show how attention to individual people and the differences between them, as well as to the concept of personality, may enrich the social psychological study of political emotion POLITICAL EMOTION IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY: A BRIEF REVIEW At present, there is an upsurge in work on the role of emotion in political issues and events Emotion has been featured in the recent study of individuals’ views of the amelioration of group inequality (e.g., Montada & Schneider, 1989), war and other large-scale violence (Dumont et al., 2003), intergroup conflict (de Rivera & Pa´ez, 2007), and reconciliation (Cˇehajic´, Brown, & Castano, 2008), as well as political debates over moral and other values (Skitka, 2002) However, research on relative deprivation theory may be the most sustained effort to examine how people’s political emotion affects their motivation and behavior Relative deprivation is conceived as a feeling of discontent— anger, resentment, dissatisfaction—based on a belief that one is 1830 Leach deprived relative to a standard of what is fair (for a review, see Walker & H J Smith, 2002) Such feelings of discontent about the perceived deprivation of one’s group have long been thought to be at the center of political rebellion and protest (e.g., Runciman, 1966; for a review, see Walker & H J Smith, 2002) And recent quantitative reviews show that it is the affect associated with the perceived deprivation of one’s group that most animates the desire for political action against this inequality (H J Smith & Ortiz, 2002; van Zomeren, Postmes, & Spears, 2008) In line with early personality (e.g., Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswick, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950; Bettleheim & Janowitz, 1950) and relative deprivation thinking (e.g., Runciman, 1966), this subjective feeling of relative deprivation is an important mediator of the effects that structural and demographic factors (e.g., income, economic class, political interest, and alienation) have on anti-immigrant prejudice (for a review, see Pettigrew et al., 2008) Most research on relative deprivation has examined its association with individuals’ real-world political views and intentions to vote or to engage in other political activity, such as protest Thus, researchers have tended to assess individual differences in beliefs and feelings that indicate relative deprivation and to correlate them with individual differences in political opinions (e.g., gender discrimination is a thing of the past), goals (e.g., the redistribution of resources to increase equality), and intentions (e.g., voting for a particular candidate) Despite this direct use of individual differences, individual participants are rarely mentioned in work on relative deprivation Particularly interesting exemplars are not mentioned; neither are subsamples of those who heartily endorse these ideologies differentiated from those who vehemently oppose them Thus, individual differences in relative deprivation are examined with no reference to what they might indicate about participants’ personality or ideological consistency In this way, the treatment of individual differences in relative deprivation is quite different from the treatment of individual differences in authoritarianism, for example This is likely due to the fact that the study of individual differences in authoritarianism has always been linked to the study of personality (see Adorno et al., 1950; Brown, 1965), whereas the study of individual differences in relative deprivation focuses on macro-social factors at the aggregate level of the group or society (see Walker & H J Smith, 2002) Consistent with the importance of the feeling of relative deprivation to political motivation, recent research on intergroup relations The Person in Political Emotion 1831 tends to focus more on specific emotions like anger (for reviews, see Iyer & Leach, 2008; Mackie & E R Smith, 2002; Parkinson et al., 2005; Tiedens & Leach, 2004) For example, Mummendey, Kessler, Klink, and Mielke (1999) examined East Germans’ feelings of ‘‘annoyance’’ about their perceived deprivation relative to West Germans during German unification in the 1990s They found that the most annoyed people also tended to be the most ready to take political action to challenge their position Consistent with a great deal of more general research on anger, recent work on intergroup relations has consistently shown that anger tends to be moderately associated with the motivation to take action to challenge existing intergroup relations (e.g., Gordijn, Wigboldus, & Yzerbyt, 2001; Mackie, Devos, & Smith, 2000; van Zomeren et al., 2004) Unlike work on relative deprivation, however, recent work on anger in intergroup relations focuses more on emotions than on politics This research proceeds mainly through assessing emotions about politically salient issues and examining these emotions as explanations of people’s motivation (i.e., goals and intentions) Thus, for the most part, politics serves mainly as the context for emotion Much recent work on political emotion is based in E R Smith’s (1993) intergroup emotion theory It marries appraisal theories of emotion with theories of group identity and intergroup relations This model views people’s subjective appraisals of issues and events (e.g., as unjust, as caused by others, as difficult to change) as the basis of specific emotions These specific emotions are, in turn, thought to lead to specific motivations to respond to the issue or event (e.g., to avoid, to confront, to make restitution for) Thus, Smith’s conceptual model emphasizes the causal links between the abstract constructs seen as central to the appraisal process of emotion: appraisal ! emotion ! motivation (i.e., goal and intention) ! action Many studies aim to examine this process by correlating measures of anger, or other emotion, to motivation to act against injustice in mediation models Thus, the pattern of correlation between measures of individual difference is used to make inferences about the processes of emotion (Kenny, 1979) As such, the social psychological study of political emotion makes little reference to individual differences, the person, or personality My own work on political emotion has been influenced by relative deprivation theory, intergroup emotion theory, and Lazarus’s (1991) appraisal theory of emotion Thus, in line with social psychological 1832 Leach convention, my collaborators and I have avoided explicit discussion of individual differences, attention to specific people, or notions of personality in our work However, in most cases, these conventions did not guide our thinking, our methods, or our analyses In fact, in many instances we drew on appraisal theories (see Arnold, 1960; Lazarus, 1991) to conceptualize individual differences in political emotion as determined by personality (Leach et al., 2003) and the personal relevance and interpretation of events (for discussions, see Iyer & Leach, 2008; Leach, Snider, & Iyer, 2002) Thus, our work represents a complex admixture of conventional reporting that erases the person in political emotion and an intellectual perspective that emphasizes the ways in which individual people give meaning to politics in light of their social and political contexts Below I revisit my own research to examine how social psychological research and reporting practice can obscure the person in political emotion I also try to illustrate how work on political emotion can keep the person in plain sight LOOKING FOR THE PERSON IN POLITICAL EMOTION Complaints about the disappearance of the individual person and his or her subjectivity have come from many corners of psychology Early in their development as subdisciplines, both personality and social psychologists had to defend their interest in the psychological experience of the person in the face of behaviorist critique (Allport, 1968) Defense of the idiographic approach has continued from Allport’s argument against a narrowly nomothetic view of psychology and science in the 1920s to the present day (see Allport, 1968; Carlson, 1971; Cronbach, 1957; Kenrick & Funder, 1988; Krueger, 2009) Feminist critiques in the 1980s also made the point that prevailing meta-theory, theory, and method in psychology could serve to limit the range of human experience under study (e.g., HareMustin & Maracek, 1988) As Unger (1983, p.11) put it in an influential analysis, ‘‘It is the transformation of people into object-like subjects that is the essence of the theoretical critique of most empirical psychological work on humans’’ (see also Henriques, Hollway, Urwin, Venn, & Walkerdine, 1984) So too has critical social psychology raised doubts about approaches that minimize the importance of human subjectivity and the diversity of lived experience (Gergen, 1973; Ibanez & Iniguez, 1997; Parker & Shotter, 1990) The Person in Political Emotion 1833 Billig (1994) identified numerous rhetorical features of the typical research report that serve to obscure the fact that participants are individual people with lives that extend beyond that of the particular study for which they have volunteered He called this erasure of the individual person in research reports depopulation These practices include providing little demographic or contextual information about samples, rarely referring to individuals (or even to participants), and reporting results as links between variables rather than as an aggregate of responses from particular individuals These conventions may have become habits for those who publish in social psychology and may operate as prescriptions for those who wish to publish (Billig, 1990) As such, the person may be so absent in a good deal of work on political emotion because of the nonreflective reproduction of apparent (rather than real) standards If so, this would mean that the person is hard to find in political emotion mainly because he or she is not being looked for Thus, for the bulk of this article I will return to my own work on political emotion to look for individual people and the variation between them I will also look for opportunities to use this focus on the individual in ways that speak to the notion of personality In this reflection on my own practice of research and reporting, I hope to show that attention to the person and his or her individuality does not undermine or contradict attention to the social, political, and structural aspects of emotion about political issues and events The avoidance of individual differences, individual people, and the notion of personality in the social psychological study of political emotion is evidenced in two styles of research First, the social psychological conduct and reporting of experimental research tend to obscure the individual person This is not surprising and is well known to both social and personality psychologists (Cronbach, 1957; Ross & Nisbett, 1991) Nevertheless, I will discuss this trend in the specific case of political emotion with the aim of showing that one can find individual people populating experimental conditions if one wishes The second style of social psychological research that makes it difficult to see the person in political emotion is the correlation of measures in mediation and other structural models The absence of the person in such models may be somewhat surprising given that correlations have long been considered the province of the personologist (see Cronbach, 1957) However, correlations are often used as evidence of (causal or semi-causal) associations between abstract constructs with little or no mention of the individuals who 1834 Leach vary in their level of endorsement (Carlson, 1971) Thus, the social psychological penchant for nomothetic approaches—designed to elucidate the general laws of nature—can also guide the representation of what would otherwise be idiographic individual differences LOOKING FOR THE PERSON IN EXPERIMENTAL MEANS Like many social psychologists, I tend to use experimental manipulations designed to affect the degree to which people interpret a political event or issue in a particular way, feel a particular emotion, and are motivated to take a particular course of action Social psychologists’ valorization of the experimental method is the first, and most obvious, source of our inattention to the person In a recent study, Tracy, Robins, and Sherman (2009) surveyed editors and editorial board members of the three sections of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Of those who exclusively reviewed and edited in social psychology, 97% reported using the experimental method; 85% of personality psychologists did so For social psychologists, reported use of the experimental method was positively correlated (.60) with describing themselves as having a social psychological orientation (e.g., endorsing the view that situations are most powerful) For personality psychologists, reported use of the experimental method was negatively correlated ( À 51) with describing themselves as having a personality orientation (e.g., endorsing the view that individuals are consistent) Quite independent of actual use, many social psychologists view the experimental method as a tool for studying situations and not persons Of course, Cronbach’s (1957) lament of this opposition of experimental and correlational methods is well known (to personality psychologists) What Cronbach could not have anticipated is that the widespread use of correlational methods by social psychologists does little to alter our view of correlations as personological and thus not social psychological Examining Person and Situation Variance As Cronbach (1957) made clear, social psychologists’ frequent use of random assignment to experimental conditions and use of analysis of variance to examine between-condition effects can legitimize inattention to individual differences (for a recent discussion, see Krueger, 2009) Random assignment is designed to minimize the effects of individual differences by spreading personalities across experimental The Person in Political Emotion 1835 conditions In an analysis of variance that treats only the experimental condition as systematic variance, the individual differences within experimental conditions are relegated to the error term in the critical ratio of F tests Perhaps as a result of this ratio, many social psychologists seem to believe that a significant experimental effect shows that the between-condition variance accounted for is greater than the within-condition variance accounted for (e.g., Ross & Nisbett, 1991; for a discussion, see Krueger, 2009) However, this is not so The F ratio takes the degrees of freedom (df ) in the between- (number of conditions – 1) and within- (number of participants – number of conditions) condition variables into account As there are often many more people than experimental conditions, a weak manipulation can produce a significant F test while accounting for substantially less variance than whatever it is that accounts for the within-condition variance (e.g., personality, error, etc.) As calculations of predicted variance, such as Z2, are based on the sum of squares (unadjusted for the df), they show quite clearly how much variance is accounted for by experimental manipulations Let me illustrate this point with reference to my own work In Iyer, Leach, and Crosby (2003, Study 2), we asked 250 European American students at a university in California to tell us how much discrimination there is against African Americans and how much sympathy they feel about it We also manipulated the way that we framed the questions regarding discrimination In one condition, we altered the questions to frame European Americans as perpetrators (i.e., ‘‘Whites discriminate on the basis of race ’’), whereas in the other condition we framed African Americans as victims (i.e., ‘‘Blacks are discriminated against on the basis of race ’’) If we had reported the effect of this manipulation in the typical way, we could have included a bar graph like Figure 1a that illustrates the result: F (1, 248) 27.78, po.001 This is a moderate-sized effect of which most experimentalists would be proud However, the Z2 10 Thus, 90% of the variance in reported sympathy is not accounted for Participants’ reported sympathy in this study ranged across the full range of the response scale (see Figure 1b) This variation across individuals within the conditions of our experiment is interesting, important, and unexplained Relegating individual differences within experimental conditions to an error term is problematic because ‘‘human freedom may then rest in the error term’’ (Kenny, 1979, p 11) That most experimental effects are dwarfed by ‘‘the 1836 Leach Figure 1a Iyer, Leach, and Crosby (2003, Study 2): Bar graph of European American’s sympathy about discrimination against African Americans N 250 Figure 1b Iyer, Leach, and Crosby (2003, Study 2): Box plot of European American’s sympathy about discrimination against African Americans N 250 error term’’ is fortunate for human freedom, but unfortunate for the development of fuller accounts of human experience and behavior Examining Person  Situation Variance Another problem with treating the person as error is that experimental manipulations cannot affect all participants equally The 1846 Leach Figure 4b Iyer, Leach, and Crosby (2003, Study 2): Correlation of European Americans’ guilt about discrimination against African Americans and support for compensatory affirmative action N 250 for compensation, and sympathy predicted support for equal opportunity However, the standardized linear associations represented in correlational models say little about how these two emotions are linked for the actual participants Even the quite left-wing students in this study tended to disagree with an affirmative action policy aimed at compensating African Americans for past injustice Most participants reported feeling guilt ‘‘not at all/very slightly’’ or ‘‘a little.’’ These trends can be seen in the scatter plot in Figure 4b Without attention to the actual distribution of participants’ responses, the associations between responses appear more similar than they are In fact, the correlation between guilt and support for compensatory affirmative action is quite similar to that for sympathy and noncompensatory affirmative action However, the scatter plots make it clear that guilt is not really a predictor of unpopular compensatory affirmative action the same way that sympathy is a predictor of the more popular noncompensatory affirmative action It seems more accurate to say that participants’ opposition to compensatory affirmative action was consistent with their low levels of guilt about discrimination against African Americans This way of reporting the result is not inconsistent with The Person in Political Emotion 1847 the presumed process (if it is indeed linear) But it does better represent the people populating the correlation As Persons There are numerous ways to conceptualize the links between the elements of the appraisal model of emotion In fact, the most prominent perspectives on this model suggest against viewing it as the sort of simple, unidirectional causal model preferred by social psychologists Lazarus (1991) describes the appraisals that correspond to each emotion as together forming a ‘‘core relational theme.’’ Although Lazarus views a particular pattern of appraisal as ‘‘underlying’’ each emotion, the relationship between appraisal and emotion is not that of a simple, unidirectional cause and effect Appraisals are also the logical antecedents of emotion (Lazarus, 1991, chap 5) That is, to feel anger is to feel agitated about ‘‘a demeaning offense against me and mine.’’ The emotion implies not only specific appraisals, but also motivation to alter one’s circumstances if they are undesirable Thus, feeling angry about an offense implies that one is likely to have the goal of doing something to confront the offender or to otherwise end the offense Certainly, appraisal can lead to emotion, and emotion can lead to goal, intention, and action However, this causal order is not necessary It may be sufficient, but it is not necessary Individuals who experience anger may engage in post hoc reasoning that their feeling is likely due to an offense because this is what anger logically implies Given the cross-sectional nature of most studies of political emotion, it makes all the more sense to view appraisal models as representing a network of constructs involved in emotion Each element in the network can be used to generate the other elements because they are all logically interrelated (McGuire, 1990) As such, any one element in the network can be manipulated to ‘‘cause’’ the other elements However, such evidence cannot be taken as evidence of a unidirectional cause-and-effect relationship given the logical relations between the elements in the network Viewing political emotion as a network of interrelated elements may encourage researchers to avoid overly generic descriptions of patterns of correlation For example, finding that the key elements within a structural model are moderately interrelated may be taken as evidence that individuals tend to show a moderate level of 1848 Leach ideological coherence in their views on a particular issue (see Adorno et al., 1950; Converse, 1964; McGuire, 1990) A network perspective may also enable greater attention to the more idiographic implications of correlational models For example, researchers might examine individual variation in the coherence of these elements, identifying individuals who show stronger and weaker links Personological moderators of ideological coherence seem important to a full understanding of political emotion One could examine whether neurotics are more prone to guilt about political wrongdoing, and the agreeable more prone to sympathy At a more ideological level, one could examine whether conservatives, or those who identify with their nationality mainly in terms of the pride and good feeling that it gives them, will be less prone to self-critical emotions like shame and guilt when their country kills civilians or tortures combatants Contextual moderators of ideological coherence also seem important to a full understanding of political emotion Viewing political appraisal, emotion, and motivation as an ideological network might also encourage attention to context as a moderator of the network coherence within individuals For example, people’s ideological network might be more tightly interrelated when a political issue or event is important enough to the society that it encourages individuals to give it personal meaning Given the Norwegian government’s admission of repeated mistreatment of ‘‘gypsies,’’ for example, individual Norwegians may be more likely to have a coherent network of political emotions on this issue than on Norway’s treatment of asylum seekers (see Gausel, Leach, Vignoles, & Brown, 2010) Political movements and political debates may also be important contexts that not only arouse political emotion but also encourage individuals to link such emotion to their understanding of themselves and of their society To politicize people is to encourage them to view their self and their society as inextricably linked Viewing the correlations between the elements of political emotion as an ideological network offers a way to examine the coherence of this network and the personal and political meaning that individuals give it Separating the Person From His or Her Context By attending to how individuals contribute to the correlation that results from aggregating their data, researchers can better contextualize individuals In this way, attention to the individuals The Person in Political Emotion 1849 who create individual differences can tell us something about the sample as a whole Attention to the individual need not be individualistic (Henriques et al., 1984) Individual differences may be used to examine what is normative within particular samples or on particular issues (Louis, Mavor, & Terry, 2003) The experience of high guilt in a sample where moderate guilt is typical may be quite different from the experience of high guilt in a sample where low guilt is typical Individuals who are high in guilt in a sample that tends to be low in guilt seem likely to be distinct from their peers in important ways that may be useful to understanding their emotion and its implications for their political motivation Person Contrast participant 35 in Figure to participant 15 Participant 35 is the median case I mentioned above His slight disagreement with White privilege and moderate disagreement with guilt are normative in this sample As such, participant 35 may encounter few others in Perth who disagree with him In fact, the general consensus around his point of view may reinforce his appraisals and feelings in a way that makes him more confident that his view is correct (e.g., Mackie et al., 2000; van Zomeren et al., 2004; for discussions, see Lazarus, 1991; Parkinson et al., 2005) Participant 15 likely has a very different experience Although participant 15’s responses place her on the same slope as participant 35, participant 15 has few peers who express the same view of what is an important political issue in the city and in the country As such, participant 15 may face constant attacks to her appraisal and feeling She may be under extreme normative pressure to conform to the majority view Greater individual intensity of emotion may be needed under circumstances where there is little support from others (Parkinson et al., 2005) or where the political opposition is great For these reasons, it seems likely that participant 15 is able to stand out from most others because of a particular personal characteristic She may be particularly high on openness or she may have a deep moral conviction that ethnic inequality is unfair and should be opposed Or maybe her identity as Australian emphasizes an egalitarian ethos? Viewing individuals within the context of the variation across individuals focuses our attention on the question of why some people are at the bottom of the slope in Figure and some are at the top To answer this question, we need to examine the person in political emotion 1850 Leach Context One way to examine the person in political emotion is to attend to the subgroups of people who populate correlations (see Leach et al., 2006, 2008) It is possible that participant 15 is able to stand out from the rest of her community because of membership in a smaller social or political community that reinforces her view Because her views are in a minority in the Perth community, my collaborators and I sought out a group of individuals like participant 15 Thus, we approached activists in the Perth area who worked for Aboriginal rights and asked them to recruit friends and acquaintances who were ‘‘concerned with social justice.’’ We ended up with a sample of about 200 non-Aboriginals (Leach et al., 2006, Study 3) Not surprisingly, they were very low in modern prejudice—moderately to strongly disagreeing with these attitudes And nearly every one of them viewed their non-Aboriginal in-group as unfairly advantaged over Aborigines and expressed moderate guilt and anger about it Our interest here was in whether it was participants’ guilt or anger that better predicted their willingness to take concrete political action to compensate Aboriginal people Our correlational model was consistent with our expectation that the active emotion of anger (total effect 303) should be more predictive of the willingness to act than the passive emotion of guilt (total effect 088) The pathway through anger was confirmed by small to moderate correlations: non-Aboriginal advantage ! anger ! willingness for political action However, this support for our particular appraisal model of political emotion obscures an important nuance for this subsample of participants As shown in the scatter plot in Figure 5, this sample of people ‘‘concerned with social justice’’ tended to be very willing to engage in concrete political action to bring about compensation to Aboriginal people (M 5.82, SD 96) In fact, only a handful of participants were unwilling to so This restricted variance in willingness for political action is likely to have attenuated the correlation shown in Figure As a result, our model likely underestimates the link between anger and the willingness to act (r 47) This is important to know What may be more interesting, however, is the asymmetric nature of this attenuation Individual differences are greater for anger (M 1.84, SD 1.23) than for the willingness to act As a result, a number of those individuals who were most willing to engage in political action expressed The Person in Political Emotion 1851 Figure Leach, Iyer, and Pedersen (2006, Study 3): Correlation of nonAboriginals’ anger about their privilege and willingness for political action, r 47 N 5185 little or no anger about the unfair advantage they believed that they had over Aboriginals Because willingness to take action was normative in this sample, individuals’ anger was only moderately associated with their willingness to act for restitution to Aboriginals (for a discussion, see Louis et al., 2003) This does not challenge the view that anger about unfairness is tied to the motivation to act against it What it does suggest, however, is that there is a strong normative force in this sample of participants that likely serves as an additional explanation of their willingness to act Thus, attention to the distribution of individuals within samples can also serve to highlight the need for (person or situation) accounts of similarity across individuals Recent work shows that knowing that like-minded others are ready to take action predicts individuals’ motivation to act against unfairness independent of their feelings of anger (van Zomeren et al., 2004, 2008) Losing the (Scatter) Plot To illustrate several of the points above, I have referred to scatter and box plots of published data Although these plots were used in 1852 Leach our analyses, not one of them was published as part of the formal research report Thus, the conventional form of reporting did not match how we thought about or how we analyzed our data In most of the work I have discussed thus far, we reported, sometimes quite complicated, structural models that showed the correlations between variables Even where we discussed these patterns of correlation as showing individuals’ tendencies to report one thing and another, readers could never see the individuals involved as they can in Figures 1–3 This is part of the reason that it is often difficult to see the person in political emotion The movement to simultaneous estimation of multiple correlations in (mediation or structural) models makes it even more difficult to see the person in political emotion Authors and audiences alike may never have a concrete sense of how the actual responses of individuals are aggregated to create these correlations Infrequent use of scatter (and other) plots makes it difficult for authors and audiences to anything other than interpret correlations in the most general way—as standardized measures of linear association Examining correlations at such a general level obscures understanding of the person and the process that such correlations aim to emphasize The person in these politics of emotion is much clearer when we can see all of the people and how they have responded to the questions we put to them For this reason alone, it may be wise to move back to the simple technique of scatter plots and box plots to add nuance to the study of the correlation between individual differences Although it is impractical to report scatter plots for all the correlations in a model, reporting the key correlations in this way would add importance nuance to models Even if they are never reported, researchers would be reminded of the people populating correlations if they began their analyses by inspecting plots that showed all of the individuals involved These plots could inform the way results are analyzed, reported, and interpreted Of course, the descriptive statistics of the measures in a correlational model can provide some of the same information (at the aggregate level) However, descriptive statistics and correlation matrices are often not included in published research reports, despite the American Psychological Association’s guidelines to the contrary (see Russell, 2002) Correlation matrices are not included in the Iyer et al (2003) article, for example I think that the absence of correlation matrices and other descriptive information is partly the The Person in Political Emotion 1853 result of how precious journal space has become in psychology This concern is increasingly important to editors, despite the fact that it is now easy for journals to make additional information available on the Internet Even if descriptive information were included with correlational models, I am not sure that the reader’s interpretation would be guided by it in the way that is encouraged by scatter plots IMPLICATIONS Viewing the person as central to political emotion is not difficult in practice It requires only direct attention to the variation across individuals that is part and parcel of most research in this area Whether this variation is explained with reference to individuality, personality, ideology, subsamples, or norms is up to the researcher Attention to the person does not require a theoretical commitment to the concept of personality or to a particular view of personality (e.g., the Big Five, attachment style, social dominance orientation) What it does require is a genuine interactionist perspective on methods, analysis, interpretation, and reporting Although both personality and social psychologists have long expressed a commitment to interactionism, both subfields continue to debate the relative importance of the person and the situation in the explanation of experience and behavior (Cronbach, 1957; Kenrick & Funder, 1988; Krueger, 2009; Ross & Nisbett, 1991) This debate has yielded more heat than light, mainly because the debate continues to pit person and situation accounts against each other as zero-sum competitors (Krueger, 2009) Despite the fact that social psychologists often study individual differences and personality psychologists take context into account (Tracy et al., 2009), each camp sees itself as distinctive from the other (Cronbach, 1957; Ross & Nisbett, 1991; Tracy et al., 2009) Given the schismogenetic quality of this intellectual competition, I imagine that some social psychologists will balk at my agreement with Billig (1994) that research on the political emotion tends to be depopulated For many social psychologists, concern for the person in the direct examination of individual differences is tantamount to arguing that the individual person is more important than the context Obviously this is not the case Individual variation in political emotion (or anything else) can be explained by person-level factors or by situation-level factors The important point is that we should 1854 Leach attempt to explain individual variation, rather than relegating it to the error term or viewing it as a nuisance variable to be controlled Individuals sometimes experience large-scale events and respond in very similar ways However, individuals can also respond to the same event in quite different ways, depending on their appraisal of the event These differences of interpretation may result from personal characteristics that make the events more or less self-relevant or give the event a particular meaning Or these differences of interpretation may result from individual ideology that may be more or less in line with that of others in his or her milieu There is no reason to make a general choice between personal and situational determinants of political emotion A general model of political emotion must be flexible enough to allow some emotion to be more personal and other emotion to be more contextual A general model must also allow for the conceptualization and examination of interactions between person and context Without direct attention to the ways in which person and context interact in political emotion, our understanding of person and of context will be incomplete (Cronbach, 1957) Interactions of person and situation explanations are not simply a more complex rendering of reality; they are an integrative representation that comes closer to the actual nature of reality Without the interaction, both person and situation are not properly understood This is as true for theory (Cronbach, 1957; Kenrick & Funder, 1988) as it is for statistics (Cohen et al., 2003; Cronbach, 1957; Krueger, 2009) Given its commitment to simple situationism and the study of process over person, contemporary research on political emotion stands in stark contrast to classic work on individual differences in political ideology and sentiment In classic studies of political personality, correlations between individual differences in ideology were taken to suggest a psychological coherence in individuals that could be validated with more general measures of personality (e.g., Allport, 1954; Bettleheim & Janowitz, 1950; Rokeach, 1968) In the hands of these interactionist sociologists and personality, social, and clinical psychologists, personality was treated as the individual’s integration of person, political ideology, and political milieu Work on the authoritarian personality (Adorno et al., 1950) is only a more well-known example of this highly influential approach to the role of the person in politics The authors of The Authoritarian Personality stated that their main goal was ‘‘to The Person in Political Emotion 1855 consider personality as an agency through which sociological influences upon ideology are mediated’’ (p 6) They spent a great deal of this lengthy book detailing the content of this ideology and examining the personal and contextual factors that contributed to its development Contemporary characterizations of The Authoritarian Personality as focused on the role of stable personality traits in the development of prejudice misstate the book’s main purpose (for a discussion, see Brown, 1965) Adorno et al (1950) were quite explicit in their desire to see whether the U.S public had the psychological potential to support a fascist movement if one developed in the country Indeed, the infamous F-scale was designed to assess the potential for fascism, not fascist ideology itself Adorno et al believed that fascism could only gain ground in the United States if a political movement was organized to appeal to the ethnocentric and other ideology that a great deal of people endorsed This contextually contingent approach to personality makes little distinction between personality and the personal endorsement of political ideology However, it views the development of political movements as necessarily based in an alignment of the personal and the political Adorno and colleagues’ (1950) interactionist perspective was inspired by the Frankfurt school’s attempt to marry a deep and nuanced treatment of the individual with a serious and informed analysis of social structure and political possibility (see Fromm, 1941) Whatever we may think of this attempt to integrate the microand macro-structuralism of Freud and Marx, the Frankfurt school continues to offer a model of a genuinely interactionist perspective on political experience and behavior (see Leach & Spears, 2008; Leach & Tiedens, 2004) This approach, and the contemporary work inspired by it, demonstrates that an emphasis of individual differences can be integrated with attention to macrolevel forces such as group membership, status, and structure In making explicit the implicit interactionism in my own thinking, research, and 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In making explicit the implicit interactionism in my own thinking, research, and writing, I have aimed to show that the person is present in political emotion However, I think that a change in. .. reporting that erases the person in political emotion and an intellectual perspective that emphasizes the ways in which individual people give meaning to politics in light of their social and political