Political Opinion Leaders, Impulsivity and Regret on Social Media

• In Event: Political Campaigning, Elite Discourse and Political Engagement

Abstract

This study demonstrates on a two-wave panel survey conducted in Spain that opinion leaders more frequently engage in impulsive political expressions on social media than ordinary users, and these impulsive acts lead to the experience of regret.

In our contemporary ‘plebeian public sphere’ (Gerbaudo, 2022), social media users’ political expressions play a crucial role in people’s perception of political reality, and this is especially true for opinion leaders’ expressions who filter and interpret political content for ordinary social media users (Bergström & Jervelycke Belfrage, 2018). While most users are highly careful when it comes to political communication on these platforms due to social risks (Thorson, 2014), we argue that opinion leaders’ unique personality makes them more impulsive: They are demonstrated to be characterized by a higher level of extroversion (Gnambs & Batinic, 2012) and their inclination to publicly demonstrate the uniqueness of their self (Chan & Misra, 1990). This public differentiation can be realized by doing impulsive and unplanned acts to be faster than others in the ephemeral and ‘real-time’ content flow of social media (Weltevrede et al., 2014) which they may end up regretting.

However, we also expect that opinion leaders with different ideological backgrounds may differ in the likelihood of engaging in impulsive political expressions. In fact, research has largely shown, that impulsive acts can be fostered by negative, particularly angry emotional states (Herman et al., 2018), and homogenous information contexts which can lower the perception of social risks (Wang et al., 2017). Since both anger (Jost, 2021), and a homogenous information environment (Barbera et al., 2015) are more typical to right-wingers, we assume that rightist opinion leaders are more likely to act impulsively and in time, suffering higher levels of regret.

We test our hypotheses on a two-wave online panel survey conducted in Spain in 2022. The findings confirm our expectations showing that opinion leaders, especially those with right-wing backgrounds, are more likely to express their opinion in the heat of the moment which, in turn, activates the intense cognitive-based emotion of regret. Since opinion leaders have a prominent role in the public, their unplanned and regretted political posts can have a major effect on the quality of the public discourse, and can contribute to the porous, real-time, and immediate temporality of the contemporary public sphere.

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Authors

• Marton Bene, HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences

• Manuel Goyanes, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid