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Updated: Sep 5, 2025

Visualizing Visual Adaptation
Published on: April 24, 2017
Color War. Does Color Influence the Perception of Political Messages?
Roberto Losada Maestre1, Rubén Sánchez Medero1
1Social Sciences Department, University Carlos III of Madrid, Getafe, Spain.
Abstract:
Several studies have shown that exposure to colors affects cognitive and affective processes. In this paper, we tried to find if colors affect the perception of political messages and activate partisan biases. We focus our study on the Spanish cultural environment. In a prestudy (n = 991), participants identified red as progressive, blue as conservative, and gray as neutral. In two subsequent experiments (n = 840; n = 938), we analyzed how these three colors influenced the interpretation of political messages and confronted them with issues ownership. The results show that the colors can activate partisan biases but do not have the same strength as issues ownership.
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