Many good ads or politicians will make a direct appeal to viewers’ emotions – and of all the candidates in recent memory, Donald Trump may be the best at doing this.
While some pundits and late-night comedians have eviscerated Trump’s campaign, calling it all flair and no substance, this might not matter to voters. Whether you’re trying to get someone to buy a product or vote for a candidate, studies have shown that appealing to emotion is nearly twice as effective as presenting facts or appearing believable.
As academics who study what makes advertisements successful and engaging, we believe Trump’s allure can be boiled down to three key factors, one of which – empowerment – encourages voters to actually work on his behalf.
Emotions Influence Behavior
But first, some background on the current understanding of emotional response in people.
Studies have shown that humans interpret what they hear and see through an emotional lens that is made up of three mechanisms: appeal, engagement and empowerment.
In a world where we’re bombarded with stimuli, from advertisements to buzzing phones, these mechanisms influence what we pay attention to, and how we react.
Appeal is simply the degree to which we judge something to be positive or negative.
Engagement is fairly self-explanatory: the extent to which an object or idea produces active or passive feelings – in other words, the level of emotional intensity it produces.
Lastly – and maybe most important – is empowerment, which is the amount of control someone feels in a given situation.
Until recently, researchers didn’t seem all too interested in empowerment. The lack of interest seems to have stemmed from a misunderstanding about this dimension, and insufficient empirical support of its effects.
And while appeal and engagement are pretty self-explanatory, empowerment is a bit more abstract. When we ask people how they feel, they can easily describe their current emotional state as either positive or negative and, to some extent, how intense that emotion feels.
In contrast, people can have a tough time delineating their feelings of empowerment, because being “in control” can’t exactly be expressed or felt in a direct or obvious way.
But this doesn’t mean that empowerment is irrelevant. Think about the emotions anger and fear. They’re both low in appeal (no one wants to feel angry or fearful) but have high levels of engagement.
So what makes these two emotions so distinctive from each other? Empowerment. When you’re scared, you feel like you’re not in control. But when you’re angry, you feel the irresistible urge to speak out and take action.
Empowerment’s Potency
When it comes to the emotional appeal of an advertisement or politician, empowerment may be more important than we think.
We recently conducted a study on empowerment, and presented it at the Association in Education in Journalism and Mass Communications (AEJMC) conference this past August.
Analyzing an array visual ads and public service announcements, the research indicated that appeals to fear (like images of dead bodies on a battlefield) were associated with feelings of uncertainty and a lack of control.
People felt a sense of danger and became acutely aware of the cruelties of war, but didn’t feel like there was anything they could do about it. Therefore, they reported low empowerment.
In contrast, messages focusing on anger (like a PSA showing a healthy body being harmed by secondhand smoke) evoked appraisals of certainty and individual control among viewers, who felt a sense of responsibility to take action and help the victims. Therefore, people expressed high empowerment on the emotional response measure.
