The Sociology of Intergroup Emotions and Support
Mentor 1
Celeste Campos-Castillo
Location
Union Wisconsin Room
Start Date
27-4-2018 1:00 PM
Description
In the 2016 election cycle, people took Donald Trump’s candidacy trivially. His popularity though continued to increase to a point where he gained enough support to lock in the Republican presidential nominee to be President. The polls leading up to the election showed his opponent, Hillary Clinton, was ahead, but Trump managed to win the Electoral College to secure the presidency. In this study, another research assistant and I watched the 2016 Presidential debates and read along with the transcript. We annotated the transcript by coding and analyzing the six primary emotions- love, sadness, fear, anger, joy and surprise-displayed by both candidates. During weekly meetings, we would discuss their codes and finalize them. As a result, we found that Trump displays significantly more emotion than Clinton. We also found that Trump and Clinton’s emotions differed significantly. In particular, Trump displayed more anger than Clinton while a greater proportion of Clinton’s emotions were joy than of Trump’s. We believe that his exhibit of more emotions about issues like Clinton’s emails led the typical voter to sway Trump’s way thereby increasing his popularity. If a candidate demonstrates an emotion about an issue that a voter feels, the voter could show support for that candidate due to a feeling of sameness.
The Sociology of Intergroup Emotions and Support
Union Wisconsin Room
In the 2016 election cycle, people took Donald Trump’s candidacy trivially. His popularity though continued to increase to a point where he gained enough support to lock in the Republican presidential nominee to be President. The polls leading up to the election showed his opponent, Hillary Clinton, was ahead, but Trump managed to win the Electoral College to secure the presidency. In this study, another research assistant and I watched the 2016 Presidential debates and read along with the transcript. We annotated the transcript by coding and analyzing the six primary emotions- love, sadness, fear, anger, joy and surprise-displayed by both candidates. During weekly meetings, we would discuss their codes and finalize them. As a result, we found that Trump displays significantly more emotion than Clinton. We also found that Trump and Clinton’s emotions differed significantly. In particular, Trump displayed more anger than Clinton while a greater proportion of Clinton’s emotions were joy than of Trump’s. We believe that his exhibit of more emotions about issues like Clinton’s emails led the typical voter to sway Trump’s way thereby increasing his popularity. If a candidate demonstrates an emotion about an issue that a voter feels, the voter could show support for that candidate due to a feeling of sameness.
