Current research overstates American support for political violence

Political scientists, pundits, and citizens worry that America is entering a new period of violent partisan conflict. Provocative survey data show that a large share of Americans (between 8% and 40%) support politically motivated violence. Yet, despite media attention, political violence is rare, amounting to a little more than 1% of violent hate crimes in the United States. We reconcile these seemingly conflicting facts with four large survey experiments (n = 4,904), demonstrating that self-reported attitudes on political violence are biased upward because of respondent disengagement and survey questions that allow multiple interpretations of political violence. Addressing question wording and respondent disengagement, we find that the median of existing estimates of support for partisan violence is nearly 6 times larger than the median of our estimates (18.5% versus 2.9%). Critically, we show the prior estimates overstate support for political violence because of random responding by disengaged respondents. Respondent disengagement also inflates the relationship between support for violence and previously identified correlates by a factor of 4. Partial identification bounds imply that, under generous assumptions, support for violence among engaged and disengaged respondents is, at most, 6.86%. Finally, nearly all respondents support criminally charging suspects who commit acts of political violence. These findings suggest that, although recent acts of political violence dominate the news, they do not portend a new era of violent conflict.

Provocative recent work (1–3)—cited in PNAS (4, 5), The American Journal of Political Science (6), 60 other articles and books, and 40 news articles that, together, have garnered over 2,281,133 Twitter engagements—asserts that large segments of the American population now support politically motivated violence. These studies report that up to 44% of Americans would endorse hypothetical violence in some undetermined future event (1–3, 7). This survey work fits within a media landscape that regularly raises the specter of political violence. Since 2016, we counted 2,863 mentions of political violence on news television, more than 630 news stories about political violence, and over 10 million tweets on the topic of the January 6 riot alone (see SI Appendix, section 1 for details for all counts in this paragraph). Political violence, however, remains exceedingly rare in the United States, amounting to 48 incidents (8) in 2019 (the most recent year for which data are available) compared to 4,526 incidents of nonpolitical violent hate crimes (9) and 1,203,808 total violent crimes (10) documented by the Department of Justice.In this paper, we reconcile supposedly significant public support for political violence with minimal actual instances of violent political action. To do this, we use four survey experiments that assess respondents’ reactions to specific acts of violence, where we experimentally manipulate whether partisanship motivated the activity and the severity of the violence. Using these studies, we identify two reasons why current survey data overestimate support for political violence in the United States.First, ambiguous survey questions cause overestimates of support for violence. Prior studies ask about general support for violence without offering context, leaving the respondent to infer what “violence” means. Using detailed treatments and precisely worded survey questions, we resolve this ambiguity and reveal that support for violence varies substantially depending on the severity of the specific violent act. With our measures, assault and murder attract minimal support, while low-level property crimes gain higher (although still low) support. Moreover, even though segments of the public may support violence or report that it is justified in the abstract, nearly all respondents still believe that perpetrators of well-defined instances of severe political violence should be criminally charged.Second, disengaged survey respondents cause an upward bias in reported support for violence. Prior survey questions force respondents to select a response without providing a neutral midpoint or a “don’t know” option. This causes disengaged respondents—satisficers (11)—to select an arbitrary or random response (12). Current violence support scales are coded such that four of five choices indicate acceptance of violence. In the presence of arbitrary responding, such a scale will overstate support for violence. Across all four studies, we show that disengaged respondents report higher support for violence.Accounting for these sources of error, our four studies show that American support for political violence is less intense than prior work asserts (Fig. 1) and is contingent on the severity of the violent act. Depending on how the question is asked, we show that the median of existing estimates of the public’s support for partisan violence is nearly 6 times larger than the median of our estimates (18.5% versus 2.9%). While recent political events show that extreme political groups are willing to engage in violence, these groups are likely to overlap with the narrow segment of the population who already support political violence. As policy makers consider interventions designed to dampen support for violence, our results demonstrate that support for violence is not a mass phenomenon, indicating that antiviolence measures should be appropriately tailored to match the scale of the problem.Open in a separate windowFig. 1.We created a census of all reported estimates of support for violence using the Kalmoe–Mason measure in the media (this includes work done by authors other than Kalmoe and Mason). This figure shows their distribution. We report this in the full sample (A), for Republicans (B), and for Democrats (C). To contextualize the problems, in these estimates, we overlay the largest estimates (orange line) and smallest estimates (blue line) from the studies that follow. There is large variation in the reported values, but all are significantly larger than our preferred estimate. See SI Appendix for additional details.     

Deceived,Disgusted, and Defensive: Motivated Processing of Anti-Tobacco Advertisements

A 2 × 2 experiment was conducted, where participants watched anti-tobacco messages that varied in deception (content portraying tobacco companies as dishonest) and disgust (negative graphic images) content. Psychophysiological measures, self-report, and a recognition test were used to test hypotheses generated from the motivated cognition framework. The results of this study indicate that messages containing both deception and disgust push viewers into a cascade of defensive responses reflected by increased self-reported unpleasantness, reduced resources allocated to encoding, worsened recognition memory, and dampened emotional responses compared to messages depicting one attribute or neither. Findings from this study demonstrate the value of applying a motivated cognition theoretical framework in research on responses to emotional content in health messages and support previous research on defensive processing and message design of anti-tobacco messages.     

Functional depletion of T- and B-memory cells and other lymphoid cell subpopulations-during trypanosomiasis.

T. brucei infection in mice causes generalized immunosuppression with multiple changes in the cells of the lymphoid tissue. Loss of B cell responsiveness to antigens and mitogens, and the induction of suppressive T-cells and macrophages, have been previously reported (Hudson, Byner, Freeman & Terry, 1976; Corsini, Clayton, Askonas & Ogilvie, 1977; Jayawardena & Waksman, 1977). In this study, purified B- or T-cell populations from infected mice have been tested functionally in vitro or in vivo by transfer into syngeneic irradiated hosts to separate the cells from trypanosomes or their products. B-memory cells for thymus dependent (DNP-KLH) and thymus independent (DNP-Ficoll) antigens are depleted or lose their potential to respond to the antigen during T. brucei infection. Similarly, purified T-helper cells, and T-cells reactive to allogeneic target cells in mixed lymphocyte reactions are functionally defective. By 16 days of infection all these responses are less than 10% of the normal level. The loss of B-cell function follows the peak parasitaemia and is accompanied by increases in the serum levels of both IgM and IgG. Enhanced Ig production and decline in B-cell potential also occur in T-deprived mice and in CBA/N mice which lack a subset of T-independent B-cells. Cells affecting delayed hypersensitivity reactions retain their activity throughout trypanosome infection and so far provide the only exception to the general decline in immune potential.     

Reading fluent speech from talking faces: typical brain networks and individual differences

Listeners are able to extract important linguistic information by viewing the talker's face-a process known as 'speechreading.' Previous studies of speechreading present small closed sets of simple words and their results indicate that visual speech processing engages a wide network of brain regions in the temporal, frontal, and parietal lobes that are likely to underlie multiple stages of the receptive language system. The present study further explored this network in a large group of subjects by presenting naturally spoken sentences which tap the richer complexities of visual speech processing. Four different baselines (blank screen, static face, nonlinguistic facial gurning, and auditory speech) enabled us to determine the hierarchy of neural processing involved in speechreading and to test the claim that visual input reliably accesses sound-based representations in the auditory cortex. In contrast to passively viewing a blank screen, the static-face condition evoked activation bilaterally across the border of the fusiform gyrus and cerebellum, and in the medial superior frontal gyrus and left precentral gyrus (p < .05, whole brain corrected). With the static face as baseline, the gurning face evoked bilateral activation in the motion-sensitive region of the occipital cortex, whereas visual speech additionally engaged the middle temporal gyrus, inferior and middle frontal gyri, and the inferior parietal lobe, particularly in the left hemisphere. These latter regions are implicated in lexical stages of spoken language processing. Although auditory speech generated extensive bilateral activation across both superior and middle temporal gyri, the group-averaged pattern of speechreading activation failed to include any auditory regions along the superior temporal gyrus, suggesting that f luent visual speech does not always involve sound-based coding of the visual input. An important finding from the individual subject analyses was that activation in the superior temporal gyrus did reach significance (p < .001, small-volume corrected) for a subset of the group. Moreover, the extent of the left-sided superior temporal gyrus activity was strongly correlated with speechreading performance. Skilled speechreading was also associated with activations and deactivations in other brain regions, suggesting that individual differences ref lect the efficiency of a circuit linking sensory, perceptual, memory, cognitive, and linguistic processes rather than the operation of a single component process.