The responsible way to engage political leaders? Leave their families out of it.
by Alli Romano
Civil discourse assumes that political leaders are fair game for criticism — but their families are off limits. However, in heated political environments, cooler heads don’t always prevail. Some constituents insult a leader’s spouse or children on social media or in private messages to get the leader’s attention and achieve personal satisfaction.
The phenomenon of attacking vulnerable family members of leaders has persisted throughout history, and today social media platforms like X and Instagram have become forums for such negative posts.
New research by Simone Tang, assistant professor of organizational behavior at the Cornell Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration in the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, and her coauthor finds that this behavior reflects a clash between the impulse to punish politicians and the desire to protect the innocent, and that the impulse can be redirected.
Across six studies, including analysis of over 562,000 tweets from the 2016 and 2020 U.S. elections and engaging 1,500 adults across five controlled experiments, Tang found that targeting family members is more likely when they seem emotionally vulnerable and when insulting them distresses the public figure. Although people generally dislike harming innocents, this pattern persists because it feels effective in hurting untouchable leaders.
“The moral norm is to leave spouses and children out of attacks, but when individuals really want to hurt political leaders, that’s when the other motivation creeps in, and they engage in uncivil discourse,” said Tang.
Mocking or disparaging the spouses or children of leaders, or “vicarious kin derogation” (VKD), is intended to cause the politician suffering. In their article “Vicarious kin derogation: When and why people mock the innocent family members of political leaders,” published in September in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Tang and coauthor Kurt Gray, a professor at Ohio State University, measured participants’ “punishment satisfaction,” or how much suffering they believed the leader experienced, and the politician’s perceived emotional vulnerability. They also tested whether involving children and spouses reduced satisfaction.
In one study, for example, researchers introduced a fictional politician named Peter Keller with a wife and a 5-year-old son and said that Keller engaged in unsavory political maneuvers. Participants viewed a photo of Keller and fake Instagram posts targeting the leader, his wife, and their child and evaluated Keller’s perceived suffering based on who was insulted.
Negative posts about the politician’s son and wife evoked more perceptions of Keller’s suffering than negative posts about the politician himself. However, the participants’ satisfaction diminished when they reflected on harming innocents, particularly children.
In another study, participants faced a moral dilemma: Select either posts that inflicted maximum suffering on the politician — VKD posts — or messages that communicated frustration directly to the leader himself. Participants were more than twice as likely to choose VKD when prompted to think about suffering than when reminded that the politician, not his family, was responsible for their frustrations.
“If we remind people, ‘You don’t like the leaders’ policies, but correctly attribute responsibility,’ then people will refrain from attacking the children,” Tang said.
Tang said she hopes the research fosters more constructive dialogue with elected leaders and discourages future VKD. “This research introduces the language to describe the phenomenon of attacking the vulnerable family members of leaders,” she said. “But it also shows that even in this heated environment, we can pause and take another option.”