Positively Valenced, Calming Political Ads

Abstract

We investigated whether political print ads were able to moderate the influence of automatic affective gut reactions (i.e., implicit attitudes) on overtly expressed evaluations (i.e., explicit attitudes) of foreigners. In accordance with the feeling-as-information theory ( Schwarz, 2012 , In Van Lange et al. (Eds.), Handbook of Theories of Social Psychology, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage), we assumed that political ads containing positive, calming stimuli (e.g., nature pictures) signal a benign environment and thus should lead to less-effortful processing in subsequent situations. Due to the fact that the implicit–explicit correspondence is assumed to be higher under less-effortful processing, we hypothesized that these political print ads are able to increase the implicit–explicit correspondence. We tested this in an experiment in which participants (N = 164) were exposed to three positively valenced, calming ads of a European right-wing party (treatment group 1), or three negatively valenced, arousing ads of the same party (treatment group 2), or bogus ads (control group). As predicted, implicit attitudes better predicted explicit attitudes in participants who watched the positively valenced, calming ads. Thus, these participants based their overtly expressed evaluation of foreigners more on their (mostly negative) automatic gut reactions. In contrast, we found that egalitarian-related nonprejudicial goals predicted explicit attitudes in participants who watched negatively valenced, arousing ads. Thus, the content of these ads seemed to be “too strong” for participants and activated egalitarian-related values, which in turn predicted explicit attitudes. Taken together, our findings underline the importance of considering the relationship between explicit and implicit attitudes when studying the effects of political advertising.