Who has never felt a rush of heat when opening their news feed, or a knot in their stomach when faced with a speech by a leader, a bill, an interview tinged with tongue-in-cheek? If there is one constant with politics, it is that it is never short of thorny and divisive subjects. Politics regularly comes to our table, often accompanied by a procession of strong emotions… perhaps more than we thought.
Our body does not treat citizen outrages like office arguments or friendly disappointments. When the public debate ignites, our biology ignites with it according to a completely new body map. This is what a team of researchers in cognitive psychology has just demonstrated, highlighting the direct link between our beliefs and our physiological reactions.
To arrive at this conclusion, the study, relayed by New Scientist, scrutinized the feelings of nearly a thousand volunteers. Researcher Manos Tsakiris, professor at Royal Holloway at the University of London, asked them to precisely locate their feelings on a body diagram. The results, translated into digital heat maps, show that certain words linked to terrorism, crime or social injustice inflame certain regions of the body that are usually quiet.
Classic anger is in fact concentrated more in the arms and the head, while political anger would massively invade the torso and limbs. Disgust, which is usually located in the digestive area, migrates to the upper body when it comes to “political” disgust and feels more like pure anger.
Pack instinct and the call of the streets
Why such a difference in processing by our nervous system? For Manos Tsakiris, the answer lies in the very nature of public action. Faced with global challenges that go beyond us on an individual scale, our body secretes emergency energy. “The sense of agency we have in politics is quite different, explains the scientist. NWe probably can’t change things on our own. It will be a collective effort.”
This internal boiling would therefore not be a bug in the system, but a democratic fuel. It is precisely this intensity of the extraordinary physical reaction that would push citizens to get off their sofas, to regroup and take to the streets to demonstrate: the body anticipates the need to unite with the group to move the lines, transforming an abstract frustration into a very real driving force.
This overheating, however, carries a risk of exhaustion: by vibrating for distant causes, the risk is of sinking into the trap of “doomscrolling”that anxious, compulsive scrolling of bad news that paralyzes the mind and tires the heart. For Dr. Lisa Quadt, a researcher at Brighton and Sussex Medical School, learning to decode these physical signals is the key to remaining an engaged citizen without sacrificing your health.
“We like to think of ourselves as rational beings, but that doesn’t take into account how the body influences our decisions, behaviors and responses”she recalls. By trying to be more in tune with our physiological reactions, we learn to respond intelligently instead of reacting impulsively. A subtle nuance, but one that could prove vital for the future of our public debate.
