We examine the political consequence of exposure to widely available video content of terror violence. In a two-wave survey of Americans, we assess who is exposed to, and seeks out, terror-related video content in the first wave and then observe who decides to watch raw video footage of the Boston marathon terror attack in the second. We focus centrally on anxiety and anger as differing emotional reactions to the threat of terrorism and document their influence on exposure to terror violence. Anxiety generates avoidance of violent terror content whereas anger increases its consumption. Moreover, we find that anger increases exposure to violent terror content and in addition enhances support for punitive and retaliatory anti-terrorism policy. We discuss the implications of our findings for the broader dynamics of terrorist violence and the emotional basis of selective news exposure.

我们研究了暴露于恐怖暴力的广泛视频内容的政治后果。在对美国人的两波调查中，我们评估了第一波谁暴露于恐怖相关视频内容并从中寻找内容，然后观察第二波谁决定观看波士顿马拉松恐怖袭击的原始视频片段。我们集中关注焦虑和愤怒，因为他们对恐怖主义的威胁有不同的情感反应，并记录了它们对遭受恐怖暴力的影响。焦虑会避免暴力内容，而愤怒会增加暴力的消耗量。此外，我们发现，愤怒增加了暴力恐怖内容的暴露，此外还增强了对惩罚性和报复性反恐政策的支持。