like terrorists.” The only item where there was an impact of emotion was on
the likelihood of going downtown. People who said they were less likely to
go downtown also were likely to say they were angry about terrorism or to be
a racial minority.
None of the emotion items were central to whether respondents watched
out for suspicious people. Instead, ideology was an important factor, with
conservatives being the people most likely to be suspicious of others.
However, “reasoned” responses were not irrelevant to these responses. Being
careful when the government raised its terror alert did affect attitudes such
as tolerance. Those who reported being careful when the alert level went up
also said they watched out for people who looked like terrorists.
THE IMPACT OF CONVERSATION
Thus far, we have found evidence that both emotion and reason are
central to people’s thinking about terrorism. However, we need to examine
the extent to which frequency of conversation with other people affects the
role of emotion versus reason. We hypothesize that conversation affects
these relationships because of the impact of repetition on cue-taking.
People who spend a lot of time talking about terrorism elevate reason over
emotion because the act of expressing thoughts to someone else provides a
sounding board that helps to screen out unreasonable or unfair reasoning.
According to the Providence survey, the September 11 terrorism remains
a topic for many people, three years after the actual attacks. When asked
about the frequency of personal discussion about 9/11 terrorist attacks with
other people, 23 percent say they discuss the attacks at least once a week,
28 percent say they discuss once every few weeks, 23 percent indicate they
talk about it once every few months, and 21 percent claim they almost never
discuss the attacks with other people. Our question did not specify who
these “other people” were, merely the frequency of 9/11 conversation.
9
Convention