Cognitive effects of political microtargeting
- Author(s)
- Selina Noetzel, Alice Binder, Jörg Matthes
- Abstract
Political microtargeting (PMT) is theorized to impact citizens’ attention and cognitive processes required for coping with persuasive messages. The empirical basis for these assumptions is limited. This study compares accurate to inaccurate microtargeting by manipulating issue fit and political fit (i.e. the congruence between the advertised issue and political party with citizens’ preferences). It investigates their impact on visual attention (i.e. first pass dwell time, total dwell time, ambient/focal viewing), cognitive schema activation (i.e. advertising schema, targeting schema), and conceptual persuasion knowledge activation (i.e. targeting awareness, advertising awareness). We conducted a 2 × 2 mixed-design experiment (N = 193) combining implicit (i.e. eye-tracking, lexical decision task) and explicit measures (i.e. self-reports). Multi-level analysis results suggest that issue and political fit increased first pass dwell time, but only political fit increased total dwell time. Advertising and targeting schema were activated irrespective of the experimental conditions. Issue and political fit increased targeting awareness, and their interaction increased advertising awareness. In other words, insights suggest that (1) PMT fulfills its attention-grabbing potential most when employed by a favored party, (2) individuals activate baseline cognitive resources upon exposure to PMT irrespective of the targeting accuracy but (3) deeper cognitive processing is activated with increasing PMT accuracy.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Communication
- External organisation(s)
- Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt
- Journal
- Media Psychology
- ISSN
- 1521-3269
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1080/15213269.2025.2527612
- Publication date
- 07-2025
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 508007 Communication science
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Social Psychology, Communication, Applied Psychology
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/ca0f3525-900c-433a-a88c-c95083eb2b0b