Using Emotions to Motivate Action and Constrain Cognition - A Speculative Perspective on ACT UP's Tactics

In Gould’s Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS, different emotions privilege different acts of contention. Gould, for example, directly links anger to ACT UP’s use of nonviolent direct action. In Gould’s account, members of ACT UP believed that anger would inspire direct action and explicitly encouraged anger in order to sustain their own and others' participation. Gould argues that members of ACT UP embraced these tactics and the anger that inspired them because doing so provided a more effective alternative to less confrontational tactics already in use by other organizations. This anger, sustained by the emotion-work of ACT UP members, served to sustain both ACT UP and its cause.

However, as Gould discusses, emotions exist within a set of frames, including political ideology, social-normative assumptions, and identity. Throughout Gould’s account, these frames shape not only which emotions are relevant but the actions that these emotions privilege and the targets of these actions. It is not clear, however, how emotions interact with these frames—whether they reflect them, amplify them, or transform them. Underlying this ambiguity in Gould’s text is an ambiguous account of the indeterminacy of emotions. Focusing on anger and emotions that moderate the effects of anger, I will here suggest a definition of emotion as modular frame that both fits Gould’s evidence and generates a set of testable hypotheses that could render her model applicable to a range of other contentious movements.

In Gould’s account, emotions reflect existing frames and help motivate but do not restrict action. I argue that emotions both create new frames and directly cause action, although they do so in coordination with wider frames. Specifically, emotions frame personal and social goals. Emotions are intimately bound to—and may even be partially constituted by—appraisals of whether a goal can or should be achieved, how much control the actor has over goal achievement, and the actor’s ability to cope with achievement or non-achievement of these goals.

Anger, for example, tends to arise when another individual’s goals are interfering with yours, when you believe that they have control over their actions, and when you believe that you cannot tolerate (cope with) interference. This pattern tends to hold even when individuals are experiencing anger as group members rather than simply as individuals.

Last, anger, like all emotions, can be instantaneous and, to a degree, transferable. If you see an angry person, you form a theory about what they are thinking and feeling that is based on the appraisals described above. If you identify with that person, you can adopt those appraisals as your own even before you have experienced their situation for yourself.

ACT UP deliberately framed events in terms of the core narrative of anger, creating an amplifying resonance between sociopolitical beliefs and instantaneous emotion. ACT UP, for example, shifted blame for the epidemic from the gay community to the government, arguing that the gay community had responded to the virus by developing safe sex practices while government actors had callously refused to act or acted in a way that further threatened the health and safety of the gay community. Further, they made anger normative, encouraging its display and privileging demonstrations of anger over demonstrations of other, potentially frame-threatening, emotions. It was impossible to be a member of ACT UP and not feel anger, impossible to be a member of ACT UP and not see the epidemic, and actors in the epidemic, through the lens of anger.

By choosing to embrace anger (over alternatives) ACT UP members were driven to direct action. Anger involves the appraisal that another person’s actions (or your own past actions, or a group’s actions, or the actions of God or fate) are intolerable. Both nonviolent and violent resistance are possible results of anger, but an emphasis on resistance is almost assured if anger is given free reign.

Hope and anger interact when an individual or group is deciding when, where, and who to resist. Anger establishes threat and the intentionality of the offending actor, but hope provides a sense of the angry person’s agency, their ability to affect change. ACT UP managed hope, framing nonviolent direct action as the most effective action and framing other tactics as hopeless. When hope was lost, some people surrendered anger, finding numbness or renewed compassion. Numbness shifted focus to inaction, leading activists to both leave ACT UP and to resist re-involving themselves in the fight to manage the AIDS crisis. Renewed compassion shifted focus away from political activism and instead emphasized helping others to cope with the epidemic, leading former ACT UP members to volunteer to care for AIDS victims. The loss of hope also brought a redirection of anger, emphasizing the perceived failings of individual ACT UP members. This new anger, expressed as a sense of betrayal, both amplified existing divisions and spurred the emergence of new social identities.

Moralization was evident in both attitudes towards government actors and, later, attitudes toward ACT UP members. By emphasizing the intentional, negative, and intolerable actions of others, anger can, when appropriately framed, create the perception that an individual’s bad behavior reflects essential badness. It is associated with increased stereotyping, both automatic and more deliberate.

Anger however, only tends to moralize around justice and fairness, not other markers of “badness” like pollution or weakness. Interestingly, anger may not only have focused the attention of ACT UP members on justice and fairness, but may have focused governmental attention on these issues as well. When medical and scientific officials paid attention, even defensively, to ACT UP’s anger, they may have been more attentive to ACT UP’s justice and fairness frames and it is possible that a combination of anger and hope encouraged frame bridging between these officials and members of ACT UP.

References:

Chapter Two; “New Feelings and an Expanding Political Horizon After Hardwick;” “Individuals and the Social Space for Militancy.”
Gould, Deborah. “Moving Politics.” Chapter Seven; “From Despair to Activism;” “Act Up’s Antidote to Despair”
Gould, Deborah. “Moving Politics.” Introduction. “New Curves in the Emotional Turn;” “Affect, Feelings, and Emotions.”
Kuppens, Peter, Van Mechelen, Iven, Smits, Dirk J. M., and De Boeck, Paul. “The Appraisal Basis of Anger: Specificity, Necessity, and Sufficiency of Components.” Emotion. 2003:3(3). 254-269.
Mackie, Diane M., Devos, Thierry, and Smith, Eliot. “Intergroup Emotions: Explaining Offensive Action Tendencies in an Intergroup Context.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 2000. 79(4):602-616.
Smith, Eliot R., Seger, Charles R., Mackie, Diana M. “Can Emotions Be Truly Group Level? Evidence Regarding Four Conceptual Criteria.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 2007. 93(3):443.
Snow, David, Rochford, E. Burke, Worden, Steven K., Benford, Robert D. “Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation.” American Sociological Review, 1986. 51(4):477
Gould, Deborah. “Moving Politics.” Chapter 2; “The Affects and Emotions of Framing;” “Aids as Genocide: Linking Fear, Grief, and Anger to Action.”
Gould, Deborah. “Moving Politics.” Chapter 4; “ACT UP and a New Emotional Habitus;” “Grief into Anger.”
Gould, Deborah. “Moving Politics.” Chapter 7; “What Despair Does;” “Forbidding Despair.”
Gould, Deborah. “Moving Politics.” Chapter 6; “Moralism.”

Morality Based in Emotional and Affective Appraisals

Some scholar believe that emotions are the basis of moral judgments. Emotions may arise from cognitive appraisals, but they may also influence cognitive appraisals. The majority of research to date has dealt with the latter influence of emotions. Emotions should be distinguished from Affect. Affect is general positivity and negativity. Some research has looked at the influence of positive versus neutral emotions on moral judgments. 


For example, Valdesolo and DeSteno (2006), examined the moderating roles of positive affect on participant responses to the footbridge dilemma. In the footbridge dilemma, the experimenter presents the participant with a fictional scenario. The brakes and steering on a train have failed. The train is hurtling towards track workers, who will all be killed if the train is not redirected onto an empty track. A bystander on a bridge above the track notice a large switch that would redirect the train. Unfortunately, the switch can only be moved by a great force. The bystander looks around and sees a heavyset man who, if pushed onto the switch, would move the switch and divert the train. The bystander herself is not heavy enough to move the switch. She must decide whether to push the heavyset man onto the switch, killing him in the process, or let the train hit the track workers.

Many participants respond to this situation by refusing to push the heavyset man to his death, dooming the workers in the process. However, Valdesolo and DeSteno (2006) were able to get more participants to agree to push the man. They did this by having participants watch "a comedy video immediately before completing a questionnaire on which they judged the appropriateness of pushing a man to his (useful) death" (Haidt & Kesebir, 2009). The positive affect, the researchers believe, counteracted any negative affect aroused by the footbridge dilemma.

Positive affect (including positive emotions) can also increase helpful action. Experiments have examined the roles of "[g]ood weather (Cunningham, 1979), hearing uplifting or soothing music (Fried &  Berkowitz, 1979; North, Tarrant &  Hargreaves, 2004), remembering happy memories (Rosenhan, Underwood &  Moore, 1974), eating cookies (Isen &  Levin, 1972), and smelling a pleasant aroma such as roasted coffee (R. A. Baron, 1997)" (Haidt & Kesebir, 2009) on helping behaviors. 

Other experiments have examined specific emotions more directly. One particularly influential emotion is disgust. Wheatley and Haidt (2005) "used post-hypnotic suggestion to implant an extra flash of disgust whenever participants read a particular word (“take” for half of the participants; “often” for the other half). Participants later made harsher judgments of characters in vignettes that contained the hypnotically enhanced word, compared to vignettes with the nonenhanced word. Some participants even found themselves condemning a character in a story who had done no wrong--a student council representative who “tries to take” or “often picks” discussion topics that would have wide appeal" (Haidt & Kesebir, 2009). Schnall, Haidt, Clore, and Jordan (2008) "extended these findings with three additional disgust manipulations: seating participants at a dirty desk (vs. a clean one), showing a disgusting video clip (vs. a sad or neutral one), and asking participants to make moral judgments in the presence of a bad smelling “fart spray” (or no spray)" (Haidt & Kesebir, 2009). 

The influence of disgust was moderated by participant awareness of disgust, as measured by the "private body consciousness" scale (Miller, Murphy, & Buss, 1981). This scale measures "the degree to which people attend to their own bodily sensations. This finding raises the importance of individual differences in the study of morality: Even if the ten literatures reviewed here converge on a general picture of intuitive primacy, there is variation in the degree to which people have gut feelings, follow them, or override them (see Bartels, 2008; Epstein, Pacini, Denes-Raj, & Heier, 1996). For example, individual differences on a measure of disgust sensitivity (Haidt, McCauley, & Rozin, 1994) has been found to predict participants’ condemnation of abortion and gay marriage, but not their stances on non-disgust-related issues such as gun control and affirmative action (Inbar, Pizarro, & Bloom, in press). Disgust sensitivity also predicts the degree to which people condemn homosexuals, even among a liberal college sample, and even when bypassing self-report by measuring anti-gay bias using two different implicit measures (Inbar, Pizarro, Knobe, & Bloom, in press)"(Haidt & Kesebir, 2009).

It should be noted that the exact appraisal underlying the relationship between disgust and negative moral judgments is not necessarily well-understood. For example, in Inbar, Pizarro, Knobe, & Bloom  (2009) disgust sensitivity predicted both attributions of intentionality to a situation that resulted in more gay men kissing in public and implicit negative attitudes towards gay men as measured by an IAT. However, it is not clear whether disgust is moderating sensitivity to moral purity and pollution or, more generally, sensitivity to the violation of social conventions. 

Tapias, Glaser, Keltner, Vasquez, & Wicken (2007) further explore the relationship between disgust and attitudes towards gay people. In this study, the researchers primed participants with words related to homosexuality. They then tested participant reaction on an onstensibly unrelated experiment. Participants reacted to this experiment as if they had been primed directly with disgust, or so the authors argue. Participants who reported being more likely to experience disgust in their daily lives also reported higher levels of prejudice towards gay people. 

Disgust is not the only emotion studied in the moral psychology literature. Anger, for example, has a powerful influence on moral judgments. Tapias et al. (2007) used the same methodology to demonstrate a relationship between anger and prejudice towards African Americans. 

Morality as Cognition

Marc Hauser's Moral Minds argues that an evolved moral faculty generates moral judgments. Moral judgments are defined as judgments of right and wrong, permitted and forbidden. This faculty applies innate principles that are biologically determined. However, these principles allow for variation.  Just as some principles of language are immutable and some are varying, so moral judgments can vary across cultures.  Culture, in Hauser's terminology, sets the parameters.  Nature gives us the principles.

Departing from other researchers in the field, Hauser argues that cognitive appraisals that may precede or be driven by emotion are distinct from the appraisals made by the moral faculty.  However, for Hauser, emotions may directly result from or accompany these appraisals and remain, in his account, an important area of inquiry.

Methodology: Supporting evidence comes from social-psychology-based laboratory experiments and surveys, behavioral economics, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology.  Hauser argues that while little evidence contradicts his thesis, more research is needed to ensure that it is the most parsimonious explanation.