“Bush Rage” & Its Consequences

George W. Bush is a president who has polarized people like few others before him: A president many people love to hate. Spend a few minutes discussing President Bush with a politically liberal individual and it may not take long for accusations of his aggressiveness to come up. In the media, he is virtually inescapable. While driving we hear about him on the radio. While walking from the parking lot to our offices, we see his face on newspaper stands. While flicking through the channels, there he is again. What is the effect of President Bush’s ubiquitous presence and so many people’s hatred of him?

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I am a Canadian doctoral student studying in the United States with an advisor originally from Germany. Being foreign-born, we have a unique perspective on American politics, which was predictably a frequent topic in our research meetings during the Iraq war. My advisor and I, along with an aggression researcher in North Dakota, wondered what effect pictures of President Bush would have on people’s thoughts and behaviors. We believed that exposure to President Bush might make people more aggressive.

We decided to use the method of “priming,” which has had a short but prolific history in social psychology. Psychologists find that people are constantly being influenced by their exposure to objects and people (“primes”) in their environment. For example, when people are unobtrusively reminded about the elderly stereotype they start to walk slower, without even realizing it. Recent research has shown that being exposed to IBM computers can reduce levels of creativity. (Since I am using an IBM to write this article, please be patient as I continue to explain.)

In the first two studies, we exposed people to pictures of President Bush and then asked them to complete various tasks. In order to ensure that participants were unaware that they were being influenced by the pictures they saw, we told them a cover story. Individuals sat at a computer and had to quickly categorize words as “helpful” (for example, love or forgive) or “aggressive” (hit or murder) after seeing a picture of President Bush (or a control picture of either a chair or President Clinton). (The faster that people respond to these words, the more heavily associated the picture and the concept is in their minds.) In the last two studies, people completed a survey in which they saw a photo of Bush (or a control picture of President Clinton) and then read an ambiguous unrelated story about a man (“Donald”) and were asked to rate his aggressiveness. In the final study, a few hundred participants

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were also asked to grade me on my survey after they had completed it, a task they believed was unrelated to the experiment.

The results confirmed our hypothesis, which was that President Bush is associated with aggressive cognitions, perceptions, and behaviours. In the first two studies, people were faster to categorize aggressive words as compared to helpful ones after seeing pictures of President Bush (as compared to a chair or President Clinton). This meant that they associated him, but not a chair or Clinton, with aggressiveness. In the last two studies, they were more likely to rate Donald as aggressive after seeing Bush. Finally, in our final study, people gave me a lower grade if they had seen a picture of Bush rather than Clinton.

However, not all people responded with aggression; we found that it was liberals who were driving our predicted effects. How could this happen to the very type of peace-loving people who protested the Iraq war all over the world? In hindsight, it’s simple: according to a popular bumper sticker, “You become what you hate.” It is precisely because liberals think of Bush as aggressive that the effects were so pronounced in them.

But don’t run out and tell all your liberal friends that they have been “Bush-whacked” just yet. Not every liberal will perceive hostility in innocent bystanders or act more aggressively after seeing President Bush. In one study, we found that our effect disappeared when people became aware of the prime, which is consistent with past priming research. We asked a group of people to list the traits that came to mind after seeing President Bush, and this group did not perceive Donald as any more aggressive than controls. So, the best remedy for Bush rage may be mindfulness.

Reflecting on my research, I wonder if I began this “aggressive” line of research after being exposed to President Bush a little too much last year. Now that I am aware of the potential effects of exposure to him, my friends tell me I have become a much nicer person.

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