Psychfest: Flashes and Filters - My First Official Attempt at Psychological Research

By Emma Harte, Psychology Student, MIC.
Supervisor: Paul Mulcahy

In the current era of political marketing, we have seen an increase in advertising on social media (Abid et al., 2025). A recent example of this is the new mayor of New York City Zohran Mamdani whose social media strategy enabled him to connect with voters (Baber, 2026). When thinking of my own social media use, I scroll past seemingly hundreds of advertisements each day, some I might only see for a second. When something goes by in a flash that quick you may wonder if it was able to leave any sort of impression at all. Perhaps if you are interested in, or know more about, the focus of the content, your gaze may linger for longer, but would that really change your opinion from that initial glance?

 Additionally, in the current era of social media, our timelines are flooded with countless images of attractive people. People so attractive in fact, you begin to question whether the image you are looking at is a real person. The use of appearance-enhancing filters has established itself as a popular feature of social media content (Lavrence & Cambre, 2020). Therefore, when considering this within the modern context of political marketing on social media, one might think about how the use of these filters may affect how a voter may judge a political candidate. If you’re anything like me, these are fascinating questions which is why I looked to explore them through my undergraduate dissertation. 

So how did I go about doing this? In order to test the effects of exposure time and image retouching I created an online experiment using the open-source platform Psytoolkit (Stoet, 2017). This involved a task where 37 participants were shown two versions of 10 fictitious political ads (one version with a beauty filter and one without – see examples below) for exposure times of 100ms and 6s.

After each image they rated how trustworthy the candidate appeared and whether they liked the candidate’s appearance on sliders from 0 to 100. Then, the participants rated the unfiltered version of each picture on whether or not they were familiar with the candidate. Once this was over, they completed a quick survey about how active they were politically on social media after which they were thanked and given additional details about the study. 

Unfortunately, disaster struck with an error in the code meaning that the data from the slider rating perceived trustworthiness and their familiarity with candidates was not saved. Despite many a freakout (shoutout to Dr Paul Mulcahy, David and Gabriela for the technical and emotional support), I persevered.

Once I had completed data collection it was time to analyse. This involved two sets of analyses. First, I looked at the overall effects of image retouching and exposure time on ratings of candidate appearance and then I looked at how those effects may be different depending on whether participants had lower or higher political activity on social media. Both of these analyses found drum roll… no statistically significant effects of image retouching or exposure time! This means that image retouching and exposure time did not impact participants judgments of candidates’ appearance in any strong way. This was the case regardless of how active participants were on social media.

Despite what common sentiments in psychology may lead any academically inclined readers to believe, my lack of any statistically significant results did not leave me in a bottomless pit of shame and despair. Quite the opposite. This now leads us to my favourite part of the scientific method where we reflect on what we have learned and start again. What does that look like in this case? I’m so glad you asked. 

The results of my study showing no strong impact of either image retouching or exposure time could have any number of implications. Perhaps we as a society have grown tired of these beauty filters and simply no longer care. Maybe exposure time is not a factor that marketing strategists should consider when thinking of all the ways in which our opinions about political candidates are shaped. Before we draw conclusions about my work it would not hurt to consider my (very) small sample size and plethora of ways in which taking part in my study was in no way like the experience of using social media. Caveats aside, I do feel that the results of my work raise some interesting questions. What those questions are specifically, well that is for future research to decide.
 

References: 

Abid, A., Roy, S. K., Lees-Marshment, J., Dey, B. L., Muhammad, S. S., & Kumar, S. (2025). Political social media marketing: A systematic literature review and agenda for future research. Electronic Commerce Research, 25(2), 741–776.

Baber, Z. (2026). Socialist Mayor in the Capital of Global Capitalism. Economic & Political Weekly, 61(1), 13.

Lavrence, C., & Cambre, C. (2020). “Do I Look Like My Selfie?”: Filters and the Digital-Forensic Gaze. Social Media + Society, 6(4), 2056305120955182.

Stoet, G. (2017). PsyToolkit: A Novel Web-Based Method for Running Online Questionnaires and Reaction-Time Experiments. Teaching of Psychology, 44(1), 24–31.

Further Reading:

Appel, M., Hutmacher, F., Politt, T., & Stein, J.-P. (2023). Swipe right? Using beauty filters in male Tinder profiles reduces women’s evaluations of trustworthiness but increases physical attractiveness and dating intention. Computers in Human Behavior, 148, 107871.

Guo, R., & Wang, Y. (2024). Finding the best creation strategy: How influencer’s photo-editing behavior affects consumer’s engagement intention. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 80, 103892.

Pelowski, M., Cabbai, G., Brinkmann, H., Mikuni, J., Hegelmaier, L. M., Forster, M., Rosenberg, R., & Leder, H. (2025). The kitsch switch - or (when) do experts dislike Thomas Kinkade art? A study of time-based evaluation changes in top-down versus bottom-up assessment. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 19(3), 377–395.

Shimamura, A. P. (with Palmer, S. E.). (2012). Aesthetic Science: Connecting Minds, Brains, and Experience. Oxford University Press, Incorporated.