Sticky, a visual engagement analytics firm I worked for this past summer, tested clips from the second presidential debate through its visual engagement platform to see people’s emotional responses to the candidates. The platform tracks peoples facial expressions while watching a video, recording 6 different emotions — Disgust, Fear, Happiness, Puzzlement, Sadness, and Surprise.

Seeing reports from the Wall Street Journal that there was a generational divide in reactions to Trump’s ‘locker room talk’ among men, we decided to run our own generational divide study to see what we could find. Using the same age groups as the Wall Street Journal did, we tested a clip from the second debate between two groups of men, 18–50 and 50–70. The clip was Trump responding to Anderson Cooper saying, “You bragged about sexually assaulting women. Do you understand?”

The clip we tested is below:

We will explain the different emotional trajectories we observed in the two groups below, and then we will explore whether what we observed reveals anything about the behavior of the two groups, which we test through survey responses.

Emotions

Sadness

The biggest insights can be seen when we isolate sadness: The millennial generation felt approximately 3x more sadness than the older generation throughout the clip.

Millennial sadness isolate of the clip

Aside from a brief peak at the very beginning, which can be chalked up to the system normalizing itself given the peak’s rapid decline into sub-significance levels, the millennial group sees both higher levels of sadness and more time above sub-significance levels than the baby boomer group.

Notably, both groups see the most emotion while Anderson Cooper is describing what Trump said, not during Trump’s comments, in which he negates the importance of his words and calls them ‘locker room’ talk.

Baby boomer sadness isolate of the clip

Happiness

Baby boomers have happiness levels above the shaded sub-significance levels for almost 6x longer than millennials do.

Millennial happiness isolate of the clip

Baby boomer happiness isolate of the clip

The baby boomers peak happiness at just before the 10 second mark when Anderson Cooper says Trump had previously described his comments as ‘locker room talk,’ and again at just after 30 seconds, when Trump uses the phrase ‘locker room talk.’

This shows a pattern of accepting Trump’s statements describing sexual assault as commonplace among the older generation: baby boomers accept the comments as ‘locker room talk.’ It appears this is not true for millennials, who have almost no happiness throughout the clip.

Disgust

Neither group displays much disgust throughout the clip, although the timing of the millennials’ disgust more closely aligns to Trump’s words than the baby boomers’ disgust does.

Millennials disgust isolate of the clip

However, millennials’ slight peak at the end comes when Trump says, “I have great respect for women, no one has more respect for women than I do.” Because the peak flatlines throughout this statement, it shows that millennials do not think Trump has great respect for women, which aligns with what we found through our survey, discussed below.

Baby boomers disgust isolate of the clip

And although the baby boomers’ disgust graph appears to display similar amounts of disgust as the millennials’ graph does, the results are actually inconclusive given the timing of the peaks.

For instance, the baby boomers’ first peak comes when Anderson Cooper says, “As you can imagine, we have been getting a lot of questions about,” which leads me to believe this peak is the system calibrating itself, especially given the rapid decline back down to sub-significance levels. The next peak comes when Anderson Cooper says Trump has previously described his comments as ‘locker room talk,’ which leads to inconclusive results because this is also when their happiness peaks.

Watch the video results for both before we move onto the survey results, starting with the video results for millennials here:

and baby boomers here:

Survey

We asked two questions: Does this clip sway your vote, and is Trump sexist. What we found aligns closely with the emotional results we observed.

72% of baby boomers reported that the clip did not sway their vote, whereas only 61% of millennials reported the same. In other words, millennials were 11 percentage points more likely to change their vote after watching the video than baby boomers.

Only 17% of baby boomers reported that the clip swayed their vote against Trump, whereas 29% of millennials are less likely to vote for Trump after watching the clip.

Interestingly enough, 10% of people in both age categories reported that they were less likely to vote for Clinton after watching the clip, even though the clip does not show Clinton saying or doing anything. I can only imagine that these people are more likely to vote for Trump because they agree with what he said, indicating that sexism and rape culture is alive and well in America, cross-generationally.

The generational divide is also apparent with the second question, as only 59% of baby boomers said that Trump was sexist, compared to the 81% of millennials who said that Trump was sexist after watching the clip.

Key Takeaways

The generational divide is real, as our emotional analysis and survey results show: baby boomers are less likely to find Trump’s comments problematic or sexist than millennials are.

Baby boomers felt a basic level of happiness while watching the clip that millennials did not, and the happiness levels peaked for baby boomers around the topic of ‘locker rooms.’ This may indicate a nostalgia for sexist conversations between men behind closed doors, which is probably less common today than it was during the respondents’ haydays.

Trump’s support remains high among this group of older men, and these results may indicate why: Trump’s tagline of ‘Make America Great Again’ may mean something significantly different to the men in this age group than to the rest of the country, putting them in a mindset of nostalgia for an earlier time when things were different and Trump’s statement could very well have passed as just ‘locker room talk.’

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