RESUMO
Repeatedly encountering a stimulus biases the observer's affective response and evaluation of the stimuli. Here we provide evidence for a causal link between mere exposure to fictitious news reports and subsequent voting behavior. In four pre-registered online experiments, participants browsed through newspaper webpages and were tacitly exposed to names of fictitious politicians. Exposure predicted voting behavior in a subsequent mock election, with a consistent preference for frequent over infrequent names, except when news items were decidedly negative. Follow-up analyses indicated that mere media presence fuels implicit personality theories regarding a candidate's vigor in political contexts. News outlets should therefore be mindful to cover political candidates as evenly as possible.
Assuntos
Política , Humanos , CausalidadeRESUMO
There is evidence that planning an action relies on binding codes of the relevant features of that action into an action plan. Such binding is indicated by the observation that planning a novel action is impaired if it shares some but not all features with another action that is held in memory for later execution. Most previous studies have focused on the binding of the spatial features left and right, which are particularly salient but not the only features of intentional body movements. In a series of four online experiments, we tested whether evidence for the binding of other (non)spatial features could also be found. Taken together, we indeed obtained evidence for the binding of temporal (short and long) and vertical (top and bottom) features, in addition to the commonly studied horizontal features (left and right). Yet, clear binding effects were mainly restricted to action features that remained uncertain up to the point the respective action had to be planned. These observations have important theoretical and methodical implications for the future studies of feature binding in action planning.
