Split Feelings: Distinct Campaign Effects on Implicit and Explicit Attitudes

• In Event: Partisan Cues

Abstract

Existing literature on campaign advertising has long suggested that people respond not only to the substantive content of an advertisement, but also its emotional content. Cues such as music, images and colors, research suggests, are important because they can alter an individual’s affective response to the ad and these affective changes may, in turn, influence their stated feelings about a candidate. This line of argument rests on the idea that ads not only change individuals’ explicit attitudes about a candidate but also their implicit attitudes. In this paper, we use psychological theories as a foundation to consider the conditions under which campaign stimuli differentially affect implicit and explicit attitudes. We do so through three pre-registered experiments that track how shifts in the emotional content of ads affect both explicit and implicit attitudes.

The studies generate two important conclusions. First, political communication can influence implicit and explicit ads separately: specific audiovisual and thematic components influence one dimension without influencing the other. Second, implicit attitudes toward a candidate appear to be improved by almost any political communication that increases familiarity with a political candidate. Effects on explicit attitudes, in contrast, are more dependent on the meaning that citizens impart to the messages they receive. These results have substantial importance for understanding how political communication can influence and manipulate voters, especially in low-information contexts.

Authors

• Yanna Krupnikov, Stony Brook University

• Timothy J. Ryan, UNC Chapel Hill