Abstract

The theory of affective intelligence dichotomizes challenging situations into threatening and risky ones. When people perceive a familiar threat, they tend to be dogmatic and partisan, since they are mobilizing decisive action based on habitual behaviors and nearly instinctual perceptions that have proved their worth in similar situations. When facing a novel risk, however, people tend to become more open‐minded and deliberative, since old solutions do not apply. An experiment with students' reactions to challenges to their opinions about a divisive political issue suggests that, indeed, democratic citizens display the different competencies that are demanded by these two different types of situation. The actual conduct of political campaigns, too, can be expected to reflect the differences between trying to guard against defections from one's side by encouraging the appearance of routine partisan combat, and trying to promote defections from the other side by prompting anxiety, hence open‐minded deliberation