JOE BIDEN: “IMAGINE”
ANALYSIS BY MORGAN RUTKOWSKI
Since the beginning of the 1940s, political campaign ads have drastically changed the ways in which U.S. voters have become informed about the current Presidential nominees. From Truman’s 1948 ad showing him shaking hands with thousands of fans to Ronald Reagan’s attack on Jimmy Carter’s weak foreign policy agenda in the 1980s, political campaigns have been transformed into bait, laced with deceptive mechanisms, to influence how we decide to vote in each election—and now more than ever before.
As the 2020 election approaches, most political advertisements have been rooted in Terror Management Theory (TMT), which postulates that self-consciousness, resulting in humans’ awareness of our own inevitable death, creates an immense amount of anxiety and terror. Therefore, candidates have capitalized on this fear by using Death Reminders, Threats to our Values, cues of Apocalyptic Visions, and Holy Longing in order to gain our political support.
Of all the current campaign advertisements for the 2020 election, the pro-Biden ad, “Imagine,” is a strong exemplar of these principles. Within the first few words of this video, our brain is primed with the peaceful images of a bustling city and thriving farms. Biden then uses the reminder of Holy Longing to connect us to the idea of progress to a picture of a baby—highlighting a time when we were young and full of unlimited potential. Biden’s ad also employs Jonathan Haidt’s theory of Moral Foundations (Haidt et al., 2009) while enacting Death Reminders; in this particular ad, Biden activates the moral foundation of Harm, which research shows is highly salient to liberals, through the Death Reminder of hurting this baby in the destructive world created under the Trump administration.
Moreover, the video shares Biden’s support for more accessible healthcare for American citizens. This, potentially, pairs with our Threat of Values when it comes to our right to have better health, as it is linked to an image of seeing a sick person on a gurney in the hospital. It also touches on the Haidt’s moral value of Fairness for all to have an equal access to healthcare, another especially trenchant value for liberals.
Additionally, Joe Biden’s video plays on our cognitive schema of how a burning world can create a Death Reminder and lead to an anxiety-driven uncertainty of our own demise. By seeing the impacts of climate change, we see a cue of an Apocalyptic Vision that would be hard to recover from if we were to vote for Trump in the upcoming election.
Finally, the campaign ad ends by depicting how Biden will “stand up to the NRA” and get “assault weapons out of our schools.” As this is seen with a segment of happy kids walking through school halls, Biden unconsciously cues our Threat to Values when it comes to limiting our Second Amendment right to protect students in hopes of reducing the death rates in American schools.
Overall, political ads have changed in many ways to ultimately help us make a more informed decision at the polls. However, this purpose has been objectively modified to manipulate our emotions, using fear-mongering tactics, in order to scare us into voting for someone that promises to reduce our unconscious death anxieties and help us feel safer and protected during the next four years of their administration.
References
Burke, B. L., Kosloff, S., & Landau, M. J. (2013). Death Goes to the Polls: A Meta-Analysis of Mortality Salience Effects on Political Attitudes. Political Psychology, 34, 183-200. doi: 10.1111/pops.12005
Burke, B. L., Martens, A., & Faucher, E. H. (2010). Two decades of terror management theory: A meta-analysis of mortality salience research. Personality & Social Psychology Review, 14, 155-195.
Haidt, J., Graham, J., & Joseph, C. (2009). Above and Below Left–Right: Ideological Narratives and Moral Foundations. Psychological Inquiry, 20, 110-119. doi: 10.1080/10478400903028573
Zaikin, V. A. (2017). Moral functioning: socio-psychological approach. Social intuitionist theory of John Haidt. Nacionalʹnyj Psihologičeskij Žurnal, 1(25), 32-38. https://doi.org/10.11621/npj.2017.0104
Morgan Rutkowski will graduate from Fort Lewis College in 2021, where she doubled majored in Political Science and Psychology with a concentration in Forensic Science. During her college career, Morgan did research for her Political Science major concerning “Fearmongering.” The project articulated the ways in which the United States government capitalizes on people’s fears in order to gain political power at the cost of our own civil rights. This research earned her a ticket to Washington, D.C., in 2020 where she presented at the National Political Science Honor Society, Pi Sigma Alpha, at the 7th Annual National Student Research Conference. Morgan attended Field School in Clinical Psychology at the facility “Gateway to Success” in Pueblo, Colorado, where she worked with the local offender population while aiding in client intakes, cognition and domestic violence classes, and outpatient groups for patients transitioning out of the State Mental Hospital.