Exposure to videos of retail theft prompts voters in a predominantly liberal city to adopt tougher, more conservative positions on local criminal justice policy. However, a study published in The Journal of Social Psychology found that participants did not change their broader political identities or overall ideological preferences. In psychology, terror management theory examines how people cope with the awareness of their own mortality. According to the theory, reminders of death or existential threats cause intense anxiety. To cope with this discomfort, people often seek reassurance in structured, predictable and historically conservative worldviews. Decades of research have produced conflicting findings on how people vote under stress: some experiments have shown a shift to the right, while others have shown polarisation. Recent political shifts in the US provided an opportunity to test these ideas in real-world conditions. In California, voters were considering revisions to a law known as Proposition 47. Originally intended to reduce the prison population by reclassifying petty theft as a misdemeanour, the law faced fierce criticism: critics argued that the 950-dollar threshold for a felony encouraged organised shoplifting because offenders faced minimal legal consequences. University of San Francisco psychologist Violet Chung-Blunden and her colleagues decided to test whether fear-inducing media content could influence voters in a strongly liberal area. They designed two experiments to determine whether videos of local crime could change participants’ decisions on Proposition 47 and also affect their overall political identity.
First experiment: adult voters in San Francisco
In the first experiment, the researchers recruited 206 adults from the San Francisco area during the week before the election. Participants were asked about their initial political beliefs, including their views on authority, immigration and the economy. They were then randomly assigned to watch one of two short videos. Half the group watched a video featuring local tourist attractions, including the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, to provide a baseline for comparison. The other half watched a compilation of news clips and online videos showing organised robberies and shoplifting in the city. After watching, participants completed a simulated exercise to revise Proposition 47: they proposed an ideal dollar threshold for classifying retail theft as a felony and specified the minimum and maximum amounts they would be willing to accept in a ballot measure. Finally, participants rated their current overall political orientation on a scale from extremely liberal to extremely conservative.
Participants who watched the crime video proposed noticeably lower minimum and ideal thresholds for felony prosecution than those who watched the tourism video. In practice, watching footage of crime prompted these voters to adopt a stricter, more punitive stance on retail theft. They became more conservative on a specific criminal justice issue. However, this shift towards conservative policy did not lead to broader ideological changes. Participants’ self-reported political orientation remained anchored in their initial beliefs, and overall they did not move to the right. A single exposure to threatening media content proved insufficient to shake their overall political identity. The researchers also looked for signs of political polarisation: they tested whether the crime video had made initially liberal participants more liberal and initially conservative participants more conservative. The data did not support this idea: participants largely retained their overall ideological positions.
Second experiment: students in a laboratory setting
To check the reliability of the initial findings, Chung-Blunden and her team conducted a second experiment involving 98 college students in San Francisco. The study followed an almost identical procedure but took place in a controlled laboratory setting. In addition, all participants were shown a five-minute video featuring breathing and relaxation exercises before watching their assigned video. This relaxation stage was intended to reduce initial differences in mood among the students. By calming participants, the researchers hoped to make any emotional responses to the subsequent tourism or crime videos easier to measure.
The results of the second experiment matched those of the first. Students who watched the crime video proposed substantially lower monetary thresholds for classifying theft as a felony across all three categories. Like the adults from the local community, the students took a tougher stance on crime after watching the threatening footage. Once again, this shift towards stricter criminal justice policy did not change their broader political identities. The crime video did not shift the students’ overall political orientation to the right. The researchers also found no evidence that the threatening footage polarised the students’ overall political views. Their overall political ideologies remained stable even as their position on a specific local policy issue changed.
Study limitations
Although the experiments show how media exposure can change specific policy preferences, the findings have several limitations. The studies were conducted in a strongly liberal city, meaning that participants were likely to be further to the left than the average American voter. The second experiment also had a high proportion of women, who generally reported more liberal views than the male participants. These demographic imbalances mean that the findings may not be fully applicable to voters in more conservative or politically divided regions. The researchers also note that their experiments measured political shifts using a threshold in a simulated policy exercise and a general ideology scale. Future studies could include a wider range of political choices, such as preferences for specific political figures in actual elections. It is also difficult to determine whether the crime videos specifically induced a profound fear of mortality, as terror management theory suggests. The footage may simply have provoked general anxiety about safety and social order. Future research needs to measure directly the specific types of emotional discomfort that prompt voters to change their opinions on public policy. The study, “Threat-Induced Conservatism in a Liberal Electorate: Issue-Based Shifts without Ideological Transformation”, was conducted by Violet Chung-Blunden, Serena Rajkumar, Yuka Hirata, Kaylin A. McDonough and Chonghei Liao.
Source: PsyPost – Psychology News
