Federal legislators in the United States actively curate their digital footprints to project a specific professional identity. A new analysis reveals that these officials frequently remove social media posts that mention their private lives or name specific colleagues. But they tend to preserve posts that criticize policies or opponents. The research was published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior.

The digital age has transformed how elected officials communicate with voters. Social media platforms allow politicians to broadcast their views instantly. However, this speed also blurs the traditional boundaries between public performance and private thought.

Sociologist Erving Goffman described this dynamic as impression management. This concept suggests that individuals constantly perform to control how others perceive them. They attempt to keep their visible “front-stage” behavior consistent with a desired public image.

In the political arena, maintaining a consistent image is essential for securing votes and support. A single misstep on a platform like X, formerly known as Twitter, can damage a reputation instantly. Researchers wanted to understand how this pressure influences what politicians choose to hide. They sought to identify which specific characteristics prompt a legislator to hit the delete button.

The study was led by Siyuan Ma from the Department of Communication at the University of Macau. Ma worked alongside Junyi Han from the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien in Germany and Wanrong Li from the University of Macau. They aimed to quantify the effort legislators put into managing their online impressions. They also wanted to see if the deletion of content followed a predictable pattern based on political strategy.

To investigate this, the team collected a massive dataset covering the 116th United States Congress. This session ran from January 2019 to September 2020. The researchers utilized a tool called Politwoops to retrieve data on deleted posts. This third-party platform archives tweets removed by public officials to ensure transparency. The dataset included nearly 30,000 deleted tweets and over 800,000 publicly available tweets from the same timeframe.

The researchers analyzed a random sample of these messages to ensure accuracy. Human coders reviewed the content to categorize the topics discussed. They looked for specific variables such as mentions of private life or policy statements. They also tracked mentions of other politicians and instances of criticism. This allowed the team to compare the content of deleted messages against those that remained online.

The timing of deletions offered early insights into political behavior. The data showed a sharp rise in the number of deleted tweets beginning in late 2019. This increase coincided with the start of the presidential impeachment inquiry. The high-stakes environment likely prompted legislators to be more cautious about their digital history.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic also shifted online behavior. As the health crisis unfolded, the total volume of tweets from legislators increased dramatically. Despite the higher volume of posts, the proportion of deleted messages remained elevated. This suggests that during periods of national crisis, the pressure to manage one’s public image intensifies.

When the researchers examined the content of the tweets, distinct patterns emerged. One of the strongest predictors for deletion was the mention of private life. Legislators were statistically more likely to remove posts about their families, hobbies, or vacations. This contradicts some political theories that suggest showing a “human side” helps build connections with voters.

Instead, the findings point toward a strategy of strict professionalism. By scrubbing personal details, politicians appear to be focusing the public’s attention on their official duties. They seem to use the platform as a space for serious legislative work rather than social intimacy. The data indicates that looking professional is prioritized over looking relatable.

Another major trigger for deletion was the mention of specific colleagues. Tweets that named other politicians were frequently removed from the public record. This behavior may be a strategic move to minimize liability. Mentioning a colleague who later becomes involved in a scandal can be damaging by association. Deleting these mentions keeps a legislator’s timeline clean of potential future embarrassments.

In contrast, the study found that criticism is rarely deleted. Legislators were likely to keep tweets that attacked opposing policies or ideologies visible. This suggests that being critical is viewed as a standard and acceptable part of a politician’s role. It signals to voters that the official is actively fighting for their interests.

The study also evaluated the accuracy of the information shared by these officials. Popular narratives often suggest that social media is flooded with false information from all sides. However, the analysis showed that legislators rarely posted demonstrably false claims. This adherence to factual information was consistent across both deleted and public tweets.

Party loyalty acted as a powerful constraint on behavior. The researchers found almost no instances of legislators posting content that violated their party’s stance. This was true even among the deleted tweets. The lack of dissent suggests an intense pressure to maintain a united front. Deviating from the party line appears to be a risk that few elected officials are willing to take.

The status of the legislator also influenced their deletion habits. The study compared members of the House of Representatives with members of the Senate. The results showed that Representatives were more likely to delete tweets than Senators. This difference likely stems from the varying political pressures they face.

Senators serve six-year terms and represent entire states. They typically have greater name recognition and more secure political resources. This security may give them the confidence to leave their statements on the public record. They feel less need to constantly micromanage their online presence.

Representatives, however, face re-election every two years. They often represent smaller, more volatile districts where a small shift in opinion can cost them their seat. This constant campaign mode creates a higher sensitivity to public perception. Consequently, they appear to scrub their social media accounts more aggressively to avoid potential controversies.

The findings illustrate that social media management is not random. It is a calculated extension of a politician’s broader communication strategy. The platform is used to construct an image that is professional, critical of opponents, and fiercely loyal to the party. The removal of personal content serves to harden this professional shell.

There are limitations to the study that the authors acknowledge. The analysis relied on a random sample rather than the full set of nearly one million tweets. While statistically valid, this approach might miss rare but important deviations in behavior. Funding constraints prevented the use of more expensive analysis methods on the full dataset.

The study also did not account for the specific political geography of each legislator. Factors such as gerrymandering could influence how safe a politician feels in their seat. A representative in a heavily gerrymandered district might behave differently than one in a swing district. The current study did not measure how these external pressures impact deletion rates.

Future research could address these gaps by using advanced technology. The authors propose using machine learning algorithms to classify the entire dataset of tweets. This would allow for a more granular analysis of political behavior on a massive scale. It would also help researchers understand if these patterns hold true over longer periods.

Understanding these behaviors is important for the voting public. The curated nature of social media means that voters are seeing a filtered version of their representatives. The emphasis on criticism and the removal of personal nuance contributes to a polarized online environment. By recognizing these strategies, citizens can better evaluate the digital performance of the people they elect.

The study, “More criticisms, less mention of politicians, and rare party violations: A comparison of deleted tweets and publicly available tweets of U.S. legislators,” was authored by Siyuan Ma, Junyi Han, and Wanrong Li.

A new sociological analysis suggests that American parents who advocate for teacher-led prayer in public schools also tend to favor specific types of security measures to prevent school shootings. These parents are more likely to support arming teachers and installing metal detectors compared to parents who oppose school-sponsored prayer. The research appears in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion .

Following the tragedy of a school shooting, public discourse in the United States often fractures into two distinct camps regarding prevention. One side typically advocates for structural or policy-based changes. These often include banning specific types of firearms or expanding mental health screenings. The opposing side frequently focuses on infrastructural interventions. These proposals usually involve increasing the number of armed personnel in schools or hardening the physical security of the buildings.

Simultaneously, a subset of American political and religious leadership often frames these events not as a failure of policy, but as a spiritual failing. This narrative suggests that the removal of religious observance from public education has left a moral vacuum. Proponents of this view argue that this vacuum invites chaos and violence.

Samuel L. Perry and Andrew L. Whitehead conducted this research to investigate the relationship between these two seemingly distinct debates. Perry is a sociologist at the University of Oklahoma, and Whitehead is a sociologist at Indiana University Indianapolis. They sought to determine if a parent’s desire for religion in schools predicts their preferred method for stopping gun violence.

The researchers drew upon the theoretical framework of Christian nationalism. This ideology posits that American civic life should be fused with a specific expression of Christianity. Previous scholarship indicates that adherents to this worldview often perceive a need to defend their social order against encroaching chaos.

Within this framework, violence is not always viewed negatively. Instead, it can be seen as a tool for maintaining order. The concept of “righteous violence” suggests that the appropriate response to a “bad guy with a gun” is a “good guy with a gun.” Perry and Whitehead hypothesized that parents who want to return prayer to classrooms would also support solutions that introduce more firearms into the hands of authority figures.

To test this theory, the authors analyzed data from the American Trends Panel. This survey was fielded by the Pew Research Center in the fall of 2022. The sample included over 3,400 parents of children under the age of 18. The survey is nationally representative, meaning it accurately reflects the broader population of American parents.

The survey asked parents to evaluate the potential effectiveness of various strategies to prevent school shootings. One category of solutions was structural. This included banning assault-style weapons and improving mental health screening. The second category was infrastructural and gun-centric. This included allowing teachers and administrators to carry guns, stationing police or armed security in schools, and installing metal detectors.

Parents also answered questions regarding their views on prayer in public education. They chose between three options. The first option was that teachers should not be allowed to lead students in prayer. The second was that teachers should be allowed to lead Christian prayers, provided other religions are also included. The third was that teachers should be allowed to lead Christian prayers even if other religions are excluded.

The analysis revealed a clear pattern regarding infrastructural solutions. Parents who supported teacher-led Christian prayer were more likely to believe that arming school personnel would be effective. This held true regardless of whether they wanted exclusive Christian prayer or inclusive prayer. These parents also expressed greater support for installing metal detectors and stationing police in schools.

The researchers found that the specific type of prayer support did not matter as much as the general desire for prayer. Parents who favored “inclusive” prayer held views on school safety that were statistically indistinguishable from those who favored “exclusive” Christian prayer. The primary dividing line was between parents who wanted some form of teacher-led prayer and those who rejected it entirely.

The study did not find a strong statistical link between support for prayer and opposition to structural policies like weapon bans. Initially, it appeared that prayer supporters were less likely to support bans. However, once the researchers accounted for political conservatism, that association largely disappeared. This indicates that opposition to gun bans is driven more by political ideology than by views on school prayer.

The researchers observed that political ideology interacts with these views in specific ways. Among parents who identified as conservative, support for armed security measures was consistently high. This was true regardless of their stance on prayer.

In contrast, parents who identified as liberal showed more variation. Liberal parents who opposed school prayer were very skeptical of armed security. However, liberal parents who supported school prayer were more open to these gun-centric measures. This suggests that for some on the political left, religious views may bridge the gap toward more conservative security policies.

The authors argue these findings illustrate a worldview where spiritual and physical defenses are intertwined. For parents who see school shootings as a result of moral decay, policy fixes like background checks may seem insufficient. Instead, they appear to favor a dual approach. This approach combines the spiritual protection of prayer with the physical protection of armed authority figures.

This perspective aligns with the rhetoric often used by politicians who champion Christian nationalist ideals. The study quotes several leaders who explicitly connect the absence of prayer to the presence of violence. For example, the authors cite North Carolina politician Mark Robinson. Robinson suggested that if a prayer vigil had occurred before a shooting rather than after, the violence might not have happened.

The preference for metal detectors among this group is also notable. The researchers suggest this fits a narrative of external threat. Metal detectors operate on the assumption that danger comes from the outside. They are designed to catch “bad guys” at the door. This differs from mental health screenings, which imply that the danger might be internal or systemic.

There are limitations to this study. The data used is cross-sectional. This means it captures a snapshot of public opinion at a single moment in time. Consequently, the researchers cannot definitively prove that wanting prayer causes a person to want armed teachers. It is possible that a third, unmeasured factor drives both opinions.

Additionally, the survey did not ask parents directly why they preferred certain solutions. The researchers inferred the connection to “righteous violence” based on previous sociological theory. Future research could benefit from asking participants to explain the reasoning behind their policy preferences in their own words.

The authors also note that while the study focused on Christian prayer, the dynamics could be different for other religious groups. The current data did not allow for a robust analysis of parents from non-Christian backgrounds. Exploring how Muslim, Jewish, or Hindu parents view these trade-offs represents a potential avenue for future inquiry.

Despite these caveats, the research provides a new lens for understanding the stalemate in American gun politics. It suggests that for a large segment of the population, the debate is not merely about the Second Amendment or school safety statistics. It is also about a deeper cultural and theological understanding of order, protection, and the role of religion in public life.

The authors conclude that proposals to arm teachers are part of a broader cultural narrative. This narrative perceives school shootings as a symptom of a godless society. In this view, reintroducing prayer is seen as a necessary step to restore moral order. Arming teachers is seen as the necessary physical enforcement of that order.

The study, “Gun Problem or God Problem? Support for Teacher-Led Prayer in Public School and Solutions for School Shootings,” was authored by Samuel L. Perry and Andrew L. Whitehead.

New research suggests that individuals who identify as politically conservative are more likely than their liberal counterparts to find “slippery slope” arguments logically sound. This tendency appears to stem from a greater reliance on intuitive thinking styles rather than deliberate processing. The findings were published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Slippery slope arguments are a staple of rhetoric in law, ethics, and politics. These arguments suggest that a minor, seemingly harmless initial action will trigger a chain reaction leading to a catastrophic final outcome.

A classic example is the idea that eating one cookie will lead to eating ten, which will eventually result in significant weight gain. Despite the prevalence of this argumentative structure, psychological research has historically lacked a clear understanding of who finds these arguments persuasive.

“The most immediate motivation for this research was an observation that, despite being relatively common in everyday discussions and well-researched in philosophy and law, there is simply not much psychological research on slippery slope thinking and arguments,” explained study author Rajen A. Anderson, an assistant professor at Leeds University Business School.

“We thus started with some relatively basic questions: Why do people engage in this kind of thinking and are certain people more likely to agree with these kinds of arguments? We then focused on political ideology for two reasons: Politics is rife with slippery slope arguments, and existing psychological theories would suggest multiple possibilities for how political ideology relates to slippery slope thinking.”

Some theoretical models suggested that political extremists on both sides would favor these arguments due to cognitive rigidity and a preference for simplistic causal explanations. Other theories pointed toward liberals, citing their tendency to expand concept definitions to include a wider range of harms. A third perspective posited that conservatives might be most susceptible due to a general preference for intuition and a psychological aversion to uncertainty or change.

To investigate these competing hypotheses, the researchers conducted 15 separate studies involving diverse methodologies. The project included survey data, experimental manipulations, and natural language processing of social media content. The total sample size across these investigations included thousands of participants. The researchers recruited subjects from the United States, the Netherlands, Finland, and Chile to test whether the findings would generalize across different cultures and languages.

In the initial set of studies, the research team presented participants with a series of non-political slippery slope arguments. These vignettes described everyday scenarios, such as a person showing up late to work or breaking a diet. For instance, one scenario suggested that if a person skips washing dishes today, they will eventually stop cleaning their house entirely. Participants rated how logical they perceived these arguments to be. They also reported their political ideology on a scale ranging from liberal to conservative.

The results from these initial surveys revealed a consistent pattern. Individuals who identified as more conservative rated the slippery slope arguments as significantly more logical than those who identified as liberal. This association remained statistically significant even when the researchers controlled for demographic factors such as age and gender. The pattern held true in the international samples as well, indicating that the link between conservatism and slippery slope thinking is not unique to the political climate of the United States.

To assess how these cognitive tendencies manifest in real-world communication, the researchers analyzed over 57,000 comments from political subreddits. They collected data from communities dedicated to both Democratic and Republican viewpoints. The team utilized ChatGPT to code the comments for the presence of slippery slope reasoning.

This analysis showed that comments posted in conservative communities were more likely to exhibit slippery slope structures than those in liberal communities. Additionally, comments that utilized this style of argumentation tended to receive more approval, in the form of “upvotes,” from other users.

The researchers then sought to understand the psychological mechanism driving this effect. They hypothesized that the difference was rooted in how individuals process information. Conservative ideology has been linked in past research to “intuitive” thinking, which involves relying on gut feelings and immediate responses. Liberal ideology has been associated with “deliberative” thinking, which involves slower, more analytical processing.

To test this mechanism, the researchers measured participants’ tendencies toward intuitive versus deliberative thought. They found that intuitive thinking statistically mediated the relationship between conservatism and the endorsement of slippery slope arguments. This means that conservatives were more likely to accept these arguments largely because they were more likely to process the information intuitively.

In a subsequent experiment, the researchers manipulated how participants processed the arguments. They assigned one group of participants to a “deliberation” condition. In this condition, participants were instructed to think carefully about their answers. They were also forced to wait ten seconds before they could rate the logic of the argument. The control group received no such instructions and faced no time delay.

The data from this experiment provided evidence for the intuition hypothesis. When conservative participants were prompted to think deliberately and forced to slow down, their endorsement of slippery slope arguments decreased significantly. In fact, the gap between conservative and liberal ratings narrowed substantially in the deliberation condition. This suggests that the ideological difference is not necessarily a fixed trait but is influenced by the mode of thinking a person employs at the moment.

Another study investigated whether the structure of the argument itself mattered. The researchers presented some participants with a full slippery slope argument, including the intermediate steps between the initial action and the final disaster. Other participants viewed a “skipped step” version, where the initial action led immediately to the disaster without explanation.

The results showed that conservatives only rated the arguments as more logical when the intermediate steps were present. This indicates that the intuitive appeal of the argument relies on the plausibility of the causal chain.

Finally, the researchers examined the potential social consequences of this cognitive style. They asked participants about their support for punitive criminal justice policies, such as “three strikes” laws or mandatory minimum sentences.

The analysis revealed that slippery slope thinking was a significant predictor of support for harsher sentencing. Individuals who believed that small negative actions lead to larger disasters were more likely to support severe punishment for offenders. This helps explain, in part, why conservatives often favor stricter criminal justice measures.

“Slippery slope thinking describes a particular kind of prediction: If a minor negative event occurs, do I think that worse events will follow? Our findings suggest that being more politically conservative is associated with engaging in more slippery slope thinking, based on a greater reliance on intuition: Slippery slope arguments are often intuitively appealing, and this intuitive appeal brings people in,” Anderson told PsyPost.

“If we change this reliance on intuition (e.g., encouraging people to think deliberately about the argument), then there’s less of an effect of politics. This political difference in slippery slope thinking has consequences for the kinds of arguments that people use on social media, and in how much they support harsher criminal sentencing policies.”

Most of the arguments used in the surveys were non-political in nature. This was a deliberate design choice to measure underlying cognitive styles without the interference of partisan bias regarding specific issues.

“We wanted to measure baseline tendencies to engage in slippery slope thinking in general, setting aside potential bias just from participants agreeing with the political message of an argument,” Anderson explained. “What this means is that, all else being equal, our results suggest that being more politically conservative corresponds to more slippery slope thinking.”

“What this does not mean is that conservatives will always endorse every slippery slope argument more than liberals will: It is very easy to create an argument that liberals will endorse more than conservatives, because the argument supports a conclusion that liberals will agree with.”

Future research could explore how these cognitive tendencies interact with specific political issues. Researchers might also examine whether interventions designed to reduce reliance on intuition could alter support for specific policies rooted in slippery slope logic.

The current work provides a baseline for understanding how differing cognitive styles contribute to political disagreements. It suggests that political polarization is not merely a disagreement over facts but also a divergence in how groups intuitively predict the consequences of human behavior.

“One potential misinterpretation is that readers may think that slippery slope thinking is illogical or irrational (since that’s often how slippery slope thinking is talked about), and thus we are saying that conservatives are more illogical or irrational than liberals,” Anderson added. “To be direct, we are not saying that.”

“How logical or illogical a slippery slope argument is depends on the specific steps of the argument: If A happens, what’s the probability that B will follow? If B happens, what’s the probability that C will follow? etc. If the probabilities are high, then slippery slope thinking is more “logical”; If the probabilities are low, then slippery slope thinking is less “logical”. In fact, there is some research to suggest that dishonest behavior sometimes does look like a slippery slope.”

The study, “‘And the Next Thing You Know . . .’: Ideological Differences in Slippery Slope Thinking,” was authored by Rajen A. Anderson, Daan Scheepers, and Benjamin C. Ruisch.