By: Richard Morin, Washington Post
Wednesday, June 23, 2004


Unconventional Wisdom
Washington Post
June 13, 2004

What's Marriage Worth?
Temper, Temper

First there was Road Rage. Now researchers claim to have identified another type of emotionalism that threatens to make life unpleasant for at least some of us.

Call it Bush Rage?

Seeing a photo of President Bush was enough to provoke aggressive thoughts and inhibit more helpful ones in four studies involving college students conducted by a research team from the University of Michigan and North Dakota State University.

In one study, two dozen undergraduates at North Dakota State sat at computers and were briefly shown a standard photo of Bush or a photo of a chair, followed by a word that had a positive meaning (such as "praise") or an aggressive word (such as "kick"). The study participants were told to characterize each word as either aggressive or helpful, and researchers timed how long it took them to do it. Participants viewed 120 word-photo combinations involving equal numbers of helpful and aggressive words.

Participants were quicker to characterize aggressive words that followed the picture of Bush and slower to characterize helpful words attached to his photo, evidence that Bush's image "primed aggressive thoughts and inhibited helpful thoughts" regardless of the students' political leanings, according to University of Michigan psychology professor Norbert Schwarz, Michigan graduate student Sara Konrath and psychologist Brian P. Meier of North Dakota State.

In another study, 87 University of Michigan undergraduates were asked to read a description and story about an individual the researchers called "Donald." A third were asked to rate the fictitious Donald before they were shown a photo of President Bush; a third rated Donald after first seeing the Bush photo and then reading about Donald; the final third first read the story, saw the Bush image, and then offered their judgments of Donald. (Whew, talk about covering all the bases . . .)

The two groups who saw the photo before rating Donald judged the mystery man to be more aggressive than those who did not see Bush. Two other studies involving about 400 other students confirmed and amplified those findings, the research team reported last month in a paper they presented at a meeting of the American Psychological Society in Chicago.

Hmmm, interesting. But what would happen if those same students were shown pictures of another president involved in contentious and divisive issues -- say, Bill Clinton?

In fact, the researchers did exactly that. In a third study, they showed students pictures of Bush and Clinton, then asked them to categorize words as either helpful or aggressive. Unlike the earlier study, partisanship mattered: Republicans were faster to characterize helpful words when they followed pictures of Bush and faster to characterize aggressive thoughts when they followed snapshots of Clinton. For Democrats, the pattern was exactly reversed.

These experiments amount to more than mere fun-and-games in the psych lab, the researchers insist. Since it's hard to turn on the TV these days without seeing the president, "images of President Bush in the media may have the unintended consequence of activating aggressive thoughts and inhibiting helpful ones," at least among political liberals, they reported. "These results highlight the possible wide-ranging cost of this effect."

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Unconventional Wisdom: New facts and hot stats from the social sciences, morinr@washpost.com

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