Threat and blame frames in political rhetoric about societal issues lead to neural and political polarization

Abstract

Abstract Online content about societal issues like climate change and immigration are often presented via frames of threat and blame. Here, we investigated how exposure to such framing in the context of an online short video-clip impacts voting behavior and associated brain activity. In a large-scale online study of 1825 Dutch participants, we found that online threat and blame framed video-clips increased agreement with the clips themselves but decreased issue voting, that is, voting in line with the intensity of one’s political beliefs. A follow-up fMRI study with 27 participants replicated this behavioral finding. It also showed that video-clips with threat- or blame-frames, compared to neutral video-clips, were represented more dissimilarly across participants in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC)—a region involved in narrative understanding. These findings suggest that subtle framing of online political content can influence voter decisions and even the fundamental act of communication itself within a society.