TY  - JOUR
A1  - Pfister, Roland
A1  - Schwarz, Katharina A.
A1  - Holzmann, Patricia
A1  - Reis, Moritz
A1  - Yogeeswaran, Kumar
A1  - Kunde, Wilfried
T1  - Headlines win elections: mere exposure to fictitious news media alters voting behavior
JF  - PloS One
N2  - 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.
KW  - elections
KW  - Twitter
KW  - behavior
KW  - United States
KW  - India
KW  - metaanalysis
KW  - personality
KW  - political theory
Y1  - 2023
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-349845
VL  - 18
IS  - 8
ER  -