The Political Psychology of Cancel Culture: Value Framing or Group Identity?

• Published date: 01 December 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129241261374
• Author: Elle Diether,Suzy Yi,Lisa P. Argyle,Ethan C. Busby
• Date: 01 December 2024

Article

Political Research Quarterly

2024, Vol. 77(4) 1130–1145

© The Author(s) 2024

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129241261374

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The Political Psychology of Cancel Culture:

Value Framing or Group Identity?

Elle Diether

1

, Suzy Yi

2

, Lisa P. Argyle

2

, and Ethan C. Busby

2

Abstract

“Cancel culture”has become a prominent phrase in US political commentary, with supporters and opponents relying on

different value-based arguments to express their views. At the same time, these camps often fall along predictable

partisan political lines. What, then, are the real motivations for promoting and opposing behavio rs sometimes labeled as

“canceling”in contemporary American politics? We explore this question through survey data from Pew in 2020 and two

original survey experiments, conducted on the 2021 CES and a 2023 online sample. We examine how Americans def‌ine

the term “cancel culture,”to what extent cancel culture is linked to both a range of core democratic values, and the role

of partisanship in shaping support or opposition to specif‌ic behaviors. We observe a signif‌icant range of views about

cancel culture and document connections to various political values. From our experiments, wef‌ind that partisanship is a

potent driver of support for and understanding of cancel culture and that value-based framing has a weaker impact as

compared to partisanship. Cancel culture provides an important case study of how Americans process conf‌licting norms

and values, including free speech and political accountability, beyond the typical constraints of the formal political system.

Keywords

cancel culture, value framing, partisanship, public opinion

Introduction

In 2019, comedian Shane Gillis was f‌ired from Saturday

Night Live over racist and homophobic slurs he used on a

podcast the year before. Some bemoaned the f‌iring as

hypocritical, rash, and unfair, attributing it to the phe-

nomenon of “cancel culture.”Others, however, disagreed

and supported Gillis’sf‌iring as appropriate and holding

him accountable for his public misbehavior (Asmelash

2019;Garvey 2019). These disagreements extend far

beyond comedians, touching on Dr. Seuss, politicians,

free speech, and even Socrates (Knowles and Bella 2021;

Thomas 2020;Wallace-Wells 2021). Americans are in-

creasingly aware of these discussions and debates:

61 percent of Americans in 2022 reported they have heard

a fair amount or more about cancel culture, substantially

up from 44 percent in 2020 (Vogels 2022).

What does it mean to be canceled, and what role does

cancel culture play in the current partisan American cli-

mate? Both supporters and opponents of “canceling”

frame their claims by referencing fundamental democratic

values. Those who call for canceling frame it as holding

people publicly accountable for their words and actions or

providing political voice to groups that historically have

less access to formal political representation. Opponents

of canceling often position canceling as a threat to free

speech or unjust punishment outside of due process. Si-

multaneously, cancel culture has taken on a partisan di-

mension, as Republican politicians have made opposition

to cancel culture a public rallying cry and affective po-

larization encourages members of both parties to protect

co-partisans while censuring or punishing the out-party.

Are views of cancel culture rooted to the democratic

values around which the debate is often framed, or are

they no more than ways to signal partisan loyalties? To

answer this question, we build on political psychology

research about how partisanship and democratic value

frames shape people’s policy preferences and tolerance for

the democratic rights of other citizens (Hsiao and Radnitz

2021;Nelson, Clawson, and Oxley 1997). Additionally,

1

University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

2

Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA

Corresponding Author:

Elle Diether, Political Science, University of Texas, 305 E 23RD ST,

Austin, TX 78712-1139, USA.

Email: ellediether@gmail.com

affective polarization is strongly related to support for out-

party rights, moral treatment of the out-party, and will-

ingness to compromise. (Barber and Davis 2022;Iyengar

and Krupenkin 2018;Iyengar, Sood, and Lelkes 2012).

However, recent scholarship suggests that ideological

disagreements and fundamental democratic values may be

at the root of the partisan divide (Costa 2021;Rogowski

and Sutherland 2016;Webster and Abramowitz 2017).

Frames about these key policy and political ideas can be

very inf‌luential on public opinion and behavior, especially

when such frames link with important and inf‌luential

values (Aarøe 2011;Chong and Druckman 2007,2013).

As a partisan touchstone of growing importance, cancel

culture provides an ideal case study to evaluate the relative

import of both people’s commitment to fundamental

democratic values and their partisan attachments.

In this paper, we use multiple sources of data to ex-

amine Americans’def‌initions of cancel culture, how those

views shift in response to values-based frames and the

partisan conditions, and how the actions citizens support

do or do not align with more abstract notions of canceling.

We f‌ind that Americans have a range of def‌initions of

cancel culture, with both positive and negative conno-

tations. We f‌ind that behaviors linked to the term “can-

celing”are primarily viewed as consisting of two separate

dimensions of support-based and punitive actions. Ad-

ditionally, we f‌ind that both the fundamental def‌inition

and the endorsement of specif‌ic canceling behavior are

dependent on the perceived partisan implications of those

actions. While democratic values and corresponding

frames are a part of the rhetoric of cancel culture, we f‌ind

that they have a much weaker impact on people’s support

for canceling in a given scenario.

Theoretical Framework

The term “cancel culture”comes from 1980’s slang,

where “cancel”referred to breaking up with someone

(Schaeffer 2021). However, the political roots of can-

celing begin with Black Twitter. The earliest appearances

of the use of the term canceling are from Black women

using it as an effort for justice, allowing disadvantaged

minorities an opportunity to give the problem attention

and prescribe a solution (Clark 2020;Ng 2022). One early

example occurred in 2013 when celebrity chef Paula

Deen’s public use of the n-word in response to the

Trayvon Martin murder case triggered a hashtag storm

(#BBQBecky, #PoolPatrolPaula) on Black Twitter. In

circumstances like this, marginalized groups can use

social media platforms like Twitter to put ordinary peo-

ple’s racist and offensive actions into the news, allowing

minorities to express frustration and set rules for social

acceptance (Clark 2020).

Since then, cancel culture has expanded; however,

there is no universally accepted def‌inition of the term

(Lopes 2022). In general, the literature agrees that cancel

culture is a phenomenon where a group withdraws support

from someone for doing something offensive (Bouvier

2020;Clark 2020;Ng 2020;Norris 2021;Tandoc et al.,

2022). However, signif‌icant disagreement underlies this

conceptualization. Some contend that canceling must

happen on social media, while others include non-social

media actions like public shaming and boycotts

(Billingham and Parr 2020;Clark 2020;Fahey, Roberts,

and Utych 2022;Lewis and Christin 2022;Mueller 2021;

Pearson 2021;Schaeffer 2021). Most def‌initions limit the

scope to punishing behaviors, although sometimes the

term includes proactive positive support—such as in-

tentionally buying a product that supports one’s views

(buycotting).

The behaviors often included in the scope of canceling

and cancel culture are not in themselves novel. They are,

in many ways, a rebranding of long-running patterns of

behaviors among citizens that use consumer behavior to

express their exit, voice, or loyalty with regards to their

political views (Hirschman 1970). For example, research

on political consumerism f‌inds that boycotting and

buycotting are undertaken by Americans as a way of

expressing their political views (Endres and

Panagopoulos 2017), that they are primarily expressive

and not an instrumental political behavior (Copeland and

Boulianne 2022), and that both have distinctive motiva-

tions (Kam and Deichert 2020).

Does cancel culture represent a distinctive set of be-

haviors and political or psychological processes from

other forms of political consumerism or social media use?

Regardless of the target or the specif‌ic actions, popular

culture (Knowles and Bella 2021;Mishan 2020;Romano

2019) and academic literature (Cook et al., 2021;Dias,

Druckman, and Levendusky, n.d.; Norris 2021) often

portrays “cancel culture”as negative. This f‌its with many

discussions of canceling and cancel culture in the media,

especially in conservative circles. In this perspective,

cancel culture may be nothing more than a rhetorical

branding used by political actors seeking to avoid the

effects of, or countermobilize against, political consum-

erist behaviors.

We identify three separate potential bases for indi-

vidual support or opposition to cancel culture. After in-

troducing these perspectives, we provide a set of research

questions and hypotheses related to the expected effect

and relative importance of each. More broadly, because it

is clearly linked to partisan and non-partisan cues, cancel

culture attitudes provide an excellent case study into how

various considerations shape public opinion about toler-

ance and democratic attitudes in the contemporary United

States.

Diether et al.1131