Unpacking the Eye of the Beholder: Social Location, Identity, and the Moving Target of Political Perspectives

TL;DR

This paper introduces the PVPS classifier that predicts how different social and political groups evaluate images, revealing that audience identity significantly influences perceived meaning and emotional response.

Contribution

The paper develops a novel classifier that accounts for audience identity, capturing evaluative disagreement rather than averaging it away, improving understanding of visual sentiment.

Findings

PVPS predicts audience-specific evaluations of images.

Perceived violence in protest images varies by audience identity.

Audience identity influences emotional responses to protest imagery.

Abstract

Political and social identities structure how people evaluate political information, a finding decades deep in political science and routinely discarded by computational tools that often produce single scores that treat a piece of text, an image, or a video as if it means the same thing to everyone. This paper shows that it does not, and that the difference is consequential. To address this problem, I develop the Perspectivist Visual Political Sentiment (PVPS) classifier, which learns from approximately 82,000 evaluations by 5,575 U.S. adults to predict how audiences defined by political and social identities will evaluate the same image. Unlike standard tools that average systematic disagreement away, PVPS preserves it, returning an evaluative profile that records who agrees, who diverges, and along which identity lines. Applied to several influential studies of visual sentiment, PVPS shows that perceived violence in protest imagery and the emotional mechanisms behind protest image engagement both change substantively once audience identity is taken into account. It follows that what a political image conveys is a moving target, and measuring it requires knowing whom it is moving.