Tea Party Health Narratives and Belief Polarization: the Journey to Killing Grandma

AIMS Public Health
Kristin Haltinner, Dilshani Sarathchandra

Abstract

In the past decade the U.S. public has expressed varying degrees of skepticism about certain factual claims, and of "expertise" more broadly. Ideological and partisan belief polarization seems to have elevated public anxiety about topics ranging from climate change and vaccines to immigration and healthcare policy. Furthermore, polarized narratives about scientific, medical, and political topics have encouraged "directionally motivated cognition", leading to a decline in institutional trust among some fractions of the U.S. political spectrum. Our case study of the Tea Party Patriots (TPP) (i.e. a political organization that promotes the Tea Party goals) uses data from 45 interviews, 80 hours of participant observation, and content analysis of movement literature, to examine the nature and nuance of health narratives employed by the Tea Party. Specifically, we explain a central narrative in TPP organizing that features "a villainous Left covertly seeking to harm U.S. citizens" as the root of three key TPP health care narratives: (1) Democratic health initiatives enslaving youth; (2) the political left profiting from covertly making Americans dependent on state's health care programs; and (3) the left clandestinely seeking to vio...Continue Reading

References

Dec 1, 2012·Psychological Science in the Public Interest : a Journal of the American Psychological Society·Stephan LewandowskyJohn Cook
Aug 16, 2015·Annals of Oncology : Official Journal of the European Society for Medical Oncology·G H Jones, H Kantarjian

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