The aim of this study was to find out whether the belief that anger reinforces your ideology can motivate you to feel anger. To investigate this, we conducted an online study where participants...Show moreThe aim of this study was to find out whether the belief that anger reinforces your ideology can motivate you to feel anger. To investigate this, we conducted an online study where participants read an article on how anger can strengthen the ideological convictions of leftists or rightists and were then asked to rank eight headlines in the order that they would want to read the corresponding articles. Six of these headlines were designed to indicate that their corresponding articles would induce either anger, fear or hope, while two of them were neutral in content. The participants’ preference for the headlines was intended to measure their motivation to experience the emotion that the headline was correlated with. The main hypothesis was that participants reading about how anger reinforces their ideology would want to engage with anger-inducing content more than participants in the other conditions. Unfortunately, the results were non-significant and the hypothesis was rejected. The participants were not more motivated to choose anger-inducing headlines after reading about how anger reinforces their ideology. Descriptively, the fear-related headlines were the most preferred out of all headlines. This can be due to a multitude of factors, the most important being the coronavirus pandemic, which could have influenced the preference for fear.Show less