Vote or ADstain: The Effect of Repetitive Exposure and Type of Advertisement on the Inclination to Vote for a Presidential Candidate

Abstract

During election campaigns, candidates use rampant political advertising as their means to gain the approval of voters. With this, it would be interesting to investigate how voters are affected by these advertisements. This study explores how repetitive exposure to two different types of advertisements—emotional or factual—induce the mere exposure effect, the psychological phenomenon by which people develop a preference for familiar ideas. The inclination to vote is studied as well. Participants are asked to play a decision-making game, wherein a political advertisement and a product placement advertisement are shown for a certain time interval. Afterwards, they are asked to accomplish a PsychoPy experiment to record their sentiments about the advertised candidate and the product through a continuous Likert scale. Moreover, the experiment also recorded the participants’ reaction time per statement. The conditions of this experiment satisfy a two-by-two factorial design; furthermore, a two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and an independent samples t-test are used for the Likert scale and reaction times, respectively.