Your Brain on Political Media
When it comes to voting, we make decisions based on more than just facts – emotion, bias, and unconscious thought play an important role in one’s decision making process. But how does advertising influence voters? In order to address this, Your Brain on Political Media visualizes American voters’ unconscious response to political advertising and media. The project was created in partnership with Brainsights, a neuromarketing consultancy based in Toronto, Canada.
RESEARCH & DATA
Neuro-data and survey data were collected by Brainsights during research studies in Manhattan, New York and Chattanooga, Tennessee between February 3-6, 2020. I analyzed and compared both data sets to understand what tone of political messaging American voters were responding to the most, as well as the social–political issues that resonated.
OUTPUT
The analysis revealed that fear was the most powerful tone utilized in American political media, which aligns with the pervasiveness of alarmism and fear mongering. Additionally, topics pertaining to socio-politics highlighted that there were four key issues to American voters; The Economy, Healthcare, Education and Climate Change. These topics align between the consciously stated survey data and the unconscious response, which is not often the case when comparing these different data sets.
In order to visualize these results, the final output was an interactive data visualization that guided users through the key findings of the study, and also allowed the users to explore the data associated with each advertisement. I created the information architecture, designed the user interface, and worked with web-developer Katherine Mello, to build the final output. Tools utilized in this project were CSS, D3, Figma, HTML, JavaScript and Vue. This project was completed as a part of my graduate thesis during the Masters of Science, Data Visualization program at Parsons School of Design.