How Political Ads Manipulate Your Anxiety About Death

Last updated on: September 16, 2016 at 11:13 am by Kyle Roberts

How Political Ads Manipulate Your Anxiety About Death 2016-09-16T11:13:13-05:00 Kyle Roberts

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Advertisers know how to tap into our deepest anxieties. For better or worse, they know how to manipulate us.

YouTube still, Clinton ad

One of the projects I was proud to work on this summer was a collaborative piece written under the auspices of the Ernest Becker Foundation–and now posted on the EBF website.

The piece is called “Voter Manipulation: Death Anxiety in Political Messaging.” (click through to read and to view a talk on death anxiety and political leadership by Sheldon Solomon, leading Terror Management Theory researcher–TMT is an extension of Becker’s theories into empirical psychology).

In that essay, we describe Becker’s main theories and their application to political manipulation, especially via campaign ads.

It provides a kind of interpretive lens you can utilize to understand what campaigns–and their marketers–are intuitively going after when they put an advertisement in front of you.

Here’s a key paragraph from our piece:

Death Anxiety in Political Messages

At their best, the institutions and activities of culture offer avenues for creating a better world. However, our motives for participating in them are invariably influenced by our mostly unconscious fear of death. Because of this, we are vulnerable to negative consequences of death anxiety; we are prone to irrational exaggeration and overreaction and we often entrench ourselves defensively and aggressively against those we perceive as opponents or threats. The world of politics is no exception. Political ads often speak to our inner longing for meaning. They tap into our quest to make a difference, if only by throwing our support behind the right leader who promises us heroic triumph over insignificance by heroism by strengthening us financially, politically or militarily, and by promoting our culture, values or religion. Conversely, political ads warn that the wrong leader might threaten our well-being and put at risk all we believe in and stand for. To protect ourselves from impending disaster, we’re urged to resist, to fight back against such leaders, their policies and even their followers

Persuasion, or its stronger form, manipulation can be benign or malicious, and we may or may not agree with the message of an ad or with its end goal. But the bottom line is, we can’t resist what we don’t understand.

Previous Post

September 14, 2016

Did You Know that Evangelicals Were Feminists, Back in the Day?

Next Post

September 22, 2016 How the Bible was Used to Justify Slavery and White Supremacy

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Uncategorized

Select a Month December 2020 November 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 December 2018 July 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz