Angry Politics: How experienced anger shifts political leader choices

Previous research showed that anger is associated with support for confrontational and punitive responses during crises, and with endorsement of authoritarian ideologies. Here, we were interested in how anger can change our choices of political leaders. In line with past research, we predicted that anger would increase preferences for authoritarian leaders. Across three experiments, we exposed participants to an anger manipulation. Before and after this manipulation, we measured participants’ political leader preferences by asking them to choose between the faces of two leaders they would vote for in a hypothetical election. The level of self-reported anger predicted the probability of choosing more dominant and less trustworthy leader after the manipulation which suggests that anger increases preferences for authoritarian leaders. Importantly, this change was absent when participants had to indicate which individuals were perceived as most successful, suggesting that our results are specific to the context of political leaders.