Negative political advertising and choice conflict

It has been argued that competing-political campaigns should be evaluated i n tandem because of synergies between them. In 2 experiments, participants received biographical information about 2 candidates followed by 6 ads from the candidates' campaigns. Candidates engaged in either a positive (i.e., focus on the positives of the candidate) or a negative (i.e., focus on the negatives of the candidate's opponent) campaign. As predicted, competing po sitive campaigns produced relatively high evaluations of both candidates, w hereas competing negative campaigns produced relatively low evaluations (co nsistent with the creation of approach-approach and avoidance-avoidance con flicts, respectively). For a synergistic interpretation, a candidate sharin g a participant's ideology was denigrated for using a negative campaign onl y when their opponent also was negative, whereas the opposing ideology cand idate was bolstered by using a positive campaign only when the shared ideol ogy candidate was also positive.