Hate speech, social identity, and ideology

Delgado and Stefancic (1995) defined hate speech as a public, conscious, and deliberate statement aimed at denigrating a group of people. In this sense, in his pioneering work Tajfel (1978) indicated that the configuration of social stereotypes is characterized by the need to highlight the perceived similarities between members of the same group or social category and to emphasize the differences with different groups or categories, frequently denigrating the opposing group.

Billing and Tajfel (1973) concluded that group construction and intergroup behavior occurred as a result of social categorization processes, which activate a social identity that triggers behaviors related to endogroup favoritism. In fact, social identity is the psychological driver of intergroup behavior, which is based on a social categorization mechanism that triggers a social comparison process. As identification with the in-group increases, one moves from the interpersonal to the intergroup extreme (Canto & Moral, 2005). This pushes the individual to search for and accentuate a positive differentiation in favor of his group when compared to others (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). This theory would help to explain that the targets of hate speech are other identity groups since it explains prejudice, discrimination, and intergroup relations by resorting to social categories where certain social identities are reaffirmed. In this line, Leets (2002) indicates that hate speech intends to denigrate a given target based on perceived differences.

Leader-Maynard and Benesch (2016) argue that both this discourse and the dangerous ideology that promotes it constitute a real risk of turning into crimes and attacks, so it is necessary to monitor and combat all hate speech given its dangerousness. As early as 1954, Allport (1954) indicated that verbal expressions of prejudice, which he called antilocutions, can lead to avoidance of the target group, discrimination, physical attack, and extermination. A clear example of this scale is the Nazi extermination, which began by singling out a particular group and facilitated its isolation and subsequent elimination (Bilewicz & Soral, 2020). In this sense, we can state that there is considerable consensus among scholars and international actors that surrounding ideologies and discourse play a fundamental role in the escalation of violence (Leader-Maynard & Benesh, 2016).

Likewise, and as indicated by Atienza-Cerezo and van-Dijk (2010), social identities are not innate, but are acquired from childhood, although it is true that they gradually change and transform through discourse and other forms of interaction. Moreover, discourse aimed at promoting a given social identity involves underlying ideological components that can create prejudice towards certain groups (Atienza-Cerezo & van-Dijk, 2010). This suggests that different ideologies contribute to the configuration of social identities that coexist in society and do so through discourse. Thus, the relationship between discourse and ideology has long been a subject of theoretical reflection in different scientific disciplines such as linguistics, philosophy, history, political theory, and social theory (Leader-Maynard & Benesh, 2016). However, it generally lacks theoretical clarity in the contemporary literature on mass violence. This is highly relevant, as discourse and ideology are intrinsically related.

Following recent trends in the study of ideology in the social sciences, we conceptualize ideology broadly, defining it as a distinctive system of normative ideas, typically shared by members of groups or societies, that underpin their understanding of the world and guide their political behavior (Leader-Maynard & Benesh, 2016). As systems of ideas, ideologies are stored in the memory, providing cognitive resources for thought processes, including decision-making, and thus shaping individual behavior. Each person's ideology is unique, but social scientists also analyze group ideologies: analytic constructs that describe important similarities between group members’ personal but heterogeneous ideologies (Leader-Maynard & Benesh, 2016).

Ideologies can also acquire important social dimensions by being embedded in institutions and recognized in political discourse. There is also evidence that hatred fuels political intolerance, defined as the support or willingness to denounce basic democratic values and equal rights of people belonging to a defined out-group in a particular society (Gibson, 2006), and is considered one of the most problematic phenomena in democratic societies. Moreover, in today’s informational contexts, different types of discourse such as anti-vaccine, hate speech, negationism, and polarization, contribute to creating strong social unrest and hindering public health policies, which is especially relevant in cases such as the COVID-19 pandemic (Picazo-Sánchez et al., 2020). To study the emotional effects of hate speech in this context of polarization and political intolerance, the stimuli used in this research involved two political figures that provoke socio-political polarization (Olaz-Capitán & Ortiz-García, 2021): Pablo Iglesias and Santiago Abascal.

Exposure to hate speech, populism, desensitization, and selective perception

When we speak of discourse, we refer to any act of human communication, not only in the form of verbal discourse but also to non-verbal communication such as images, gestures, music, rituals, among others. Ideologies are communicated through discourse and, consequently, they are constructed and altered through discourse. They are also produced through an individual's thinking, but genuinely creative thinking is arduous. Most people avoid it most of the time, and instead appropriate ideas they glean from social discourse (Leader-Maynard & Benesh, 2016).

Individuals’ continued exposure to such messages produces the phenomenon of desensitization: after an initial physiological and affective (negative) arousal, individuals gradually learn to ignore these messages and become desensitized. The General Model of Aggression outlined by Carnagey et al. (2007) explains how these physiological responses generate cognitive and affective outcomes that could lead to increased aggressive behavior and a decreased likelihood of helping victims. Desensitization processes observed at lower physiological levels (decreased heart rate and decreased skin conductance) reflect the extinction of negative emotional reactions towards violence associated with: decreased perception of the seriousness of the aggression decreased attention to violent events, decreased sympathy for victims of violence, increased belief that violence is normative, and decreased negative attitudes towards violence. Along the same lines, Soral et al. (2018) conducted several experiments that demonstrated that the greater the desensitization of the individual towards hate speech, the greater the persuasive capacity of the message and the prejudice towards the group targeted by hatred. In short, the individual becomes desensitized, normalizes hate speech, and transforms it into resentment, increasing prejudice and violence towards the subjects of hate.

Likewise, it is important to consider that when speakers delivering hate speech display traits such as aggressiveness, shyness, or fear, this affects their credibility (Cole & McCroskey, 2003), which becomes more pronounced in the case of a political figure delivering the message. Thus, the deployment of aggressive persuasive strategies negatively affects the credibility of the message, which is perceived more negatively (Nau, 2012).

In this sense, it should be emphasized that hate speech feeds political intolerance, defined as the support or willingness to denounce basic democratic values and the equal rights of people belonging to a defined out-group in a particular society (Gibson, 2006). This is considered one of the most problematic phenomena in democratic societies. Hence the importance of analyzing the emotions it provokes, how individuals perceive this type of message and how ideology influences resulting emotions and perceptions. Desensitization to violence and hatred has been widely studied in the field of videogames (Bermejo-Berros & Soto-Sanfiel, 2015), but there is very little scientific evidence derived from experimental work in the case of political discourse in the media.

On the other hand, “selective perception bias” favors the positive evaluation of the discourse by senders with ideological affinity and the rejection of ideologically opposed discourse, especially in the field of political communication (Paz-García et al., 2020). These phenomena are causing an intense political polarization often accompanied by emotional reactions that are more linked to the sender’s profile than to the discourse itself. Some authors interpret these psycho-social mechanisms within the framework of “post-truth theories” (Waisbord, 2018).

Moreover, the elaboration likelihood model has demonstrated the importance of peripheral aspects in understanding the persuasive effectiveness of a message (Petty et al., 1983; Paredes et al., 2021). In the field of political communication, peripheral processing plays a very important role, given that receivers are not usually motivated to exert the effort to process through the central route (Marañón-Lazcano, 2015). In this sense, this model would confirm the importance of cognitive biases related to selective perception, as well as theories of intergroup biases, conflict, and prejudice (Crawford & Brandt, 2020). These theories analyze related but different mechanisms, such as desensitization, processing type, cognitive biases of selective perception, intergroup biases or polarization, and populism. However, all of them agree in proposing a likely result when analyzing political discourse mediated by a highly polarized and ideologically defined speaker: the cognitive and emotional effects provoked by hate messages will not depend so much on the content of the discourse as on the ideological affiliation of the receiver with that of the sender. Accordingly, this paper proposes the following hypotheses:

• Hypothesis 1: The cognitive and emotional effects triggered by discourse (hate vs. neutral) delivered by highly polarized senders will depend on their ideological affinity with the receiver

• Hypothesis 2: These effects will also display interaction between the main repeated measures factor (message type) and the grouping factor (ideology).

Material and instruments

This research aims to analyze the cognitive and emotional effects of the message. In this sense, there is strong empirical evidence that shows that the “perceived truthfulness” of both the sender and the message is among the most important cognitive effects (Hovland et al., 1953). The assessment of these variables has been shown to be very effective using traditional Likert-type self-report scales (Woodruff & Cashman, 1993). However, the assessment of emotion elicited by political speech has been controversial, since self-reports are often unreliable. This is due to the emotions that are produced implicitly, and the subjects’ insufficient awareness of the emotion elicited by the situation since it is produced at a pre-conscious level (Smith, 2020). This methodological difficulty has been a major problem for the objective study of emotional processes. However, neuro communication techniques are now available, making it possible to evaluate these emotions using highly accurate and valid biometric measures. In this area, the pioneering work of Cline et al. (1973) analyzed young people’s “desensitization” to broadcasts of violence on television using a methodology based on the measurement of autonomic responses (electrodermal skin response and heart rate variability). However, this line of research has not been developed, due to the enormous technical difficulties that existed to evaluate both variables together, to synchronize them adequately with the stimulus presented, and to carry it out in a non-invasive environment. In this study, we have evaluated the biometric emotional response using the NeuroLynQ tool, which allows the simultaneous collection of biometric data from participants by measuring emotional arousal through electrodermal activity (EDA) and heart rate variability (HRV). Heart rate variability (HRV) is the result of interactions between the autonomic nervous system (ANS) and the intrinsic heart function mechanism. HRV is based on the balance between the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), and it is one of the most effective measures of emotion (Fonfría et al., 2011).

Thus, the measurement of cardiac variability not only provides relevant information about emotional changes, but it is also the variable that allows validating the values obtained in the measurement of the electrodermal response avoiding false positives due to internal homeostasis processes (Tarnowski et al., 2018). This occurrence of false positives in the assessment of emotion by EDA is, unfortunately, very frequent, limiting the validity of the measurement. Consequently, the use of both measures simultaneously (HRV and EDA) is a dramatic advance in the objective assessment of subjects' emotions. Figure 1 shows a diagram of setup A, which includes both the computer with NeuroLynQ and the WIFI receiver with a webcam to record the session, and setup B for each participant, which includes both electrodes for heart rate (white arrow) and galvanic response (black and green arrow).

Methods

A multigroup repeated measures design was used. The “within-group” independent variable (repeated measures) was “type of speech/video” with four experimental conditions: Video-Iglesias-Hate, Video-Iglesias-No-Hate, Video-Abascal-Hate, Video-Abascal-No-Hate). The independent “between-group” (grouping) variable was “ideology type”. The dependent variables were measures of message and sender perception, as well as biometric and self-report measures of emotion. A group of 39 volunteer participants (31 females and eight males with a mean age of 21) at the undergraduate level were randomly recruited for the experiment. Previous work has validated that this sample size allows reliable conclusions to be reached (Cuesta et al., 2020). They were informed that they would be watching videos, but no information was provided about the purpose. They were then presented with a series of four 20-second videos featuring two Spanish politicians. Two of the videos featured Pablo Iglesias and the other two featured Santiago Abascal. Each politician was featured in one video delivering a neutral speech (about global politics) and one video delivering a hate speech (about immigration and inter-party power struggles). The videos were practically identical: they lasted 20 seconds and took place in the Spanish Parliament. These videos were designed by three experts in political communication, specifically, three political communication university professors with experience in defining these types of messages and procedures. A pilot study carried out with 15 university students confirmed the validity of the stimuli.

Before watching the videos, participants were given a questionnaire in which they indicated their political ideology on a scale from one (very conservative) to seven (very progressive). The videos were then presented to them, pausing after each one for participants to complete a 7-point Likert-type questionnaire where they reported on the degree of credibility of the message and of the speaker, as well as on the “anger” (emotion) produced by the video. This type of scale has been previously used in similar research, where they have demonstrated its validity for this type of study (Cuesta et al., 2012). The order of the videos was randomized. The session was recorded with a webcam that sent the feed to a computer that collected the biometric signals, in order to identify the intervals where the videos were shown and synchronized with the biometric signals. The participants were finally informed about the purpose of the study following the ethical protocols validated by the university.

Data analysis

To compare the percentage of emotional response in the biometric variables between videos, a one-factor ANOVA (type of speech) was performed, followed by a Turkey post hoc test and Q-test to find out the effect between different stimuli. The significance level was set at p≤0.05. In addition, the graphs provided by the NeuroLynQ tool where emotion levels are reflected as a function of the type of video and the ideological affiliation of the recipient were analyzed. For this purpose, the political affiliation variable was dichotomized (1=conservative, 2=progressive) based on the extreme values of the scale. The results of the dependent variables, perception of the truthfulness of the sender and the message, as well as self-referred emotion (anger), were also subjected to analysis of variance and post hoc tests.