A first-of-its-kind study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, looked into this behavior by looking at short political video ads that were meant to either move or anger voters. This has implications for how parties communicate their messages and spend their ad dollars. No surprise there: People can either be moved or irritated by political ads. This reaction leads them to support their side, but only if the ads are similar to what they already believe. Lead author David Grüning said that at a very general level, it might surprise some people that political advertisements are not all attack ads. Even though today’s politics are so polarized, many ads try to inspire and move their target audience.
Feeling moved by an ad from the party you like to start with has a stronger effect than when the other party moves you’. When shown the ads, the video had more of an impact on viewers if they thought it was made by their favorite political party, even if it was not.
Results from the study also show that political ads in modern politics don’t seem to be very effective at getting people to vote for them.
So campaign ads should be clear about their political affiliation to avoid ” unwillingly feeding the support of political competitors,” say Grüning and co-author Thomas W Schubert at the University of Oslo.
“We have only looked at motivation and intention to support, which is much easier to measure,” says Grüning. “An essential next step would be to examine supportive behavior as an outcome of being moved or angered by political ads”
Perhaps the most important thing that research shows is that people on both sides of the issues are emotional people, which can get lost in today’s political atmosphere.
