Priming (media)

Last updated December 01, 2023

The priming theory states that media images stimulate related thoughts in the minds of audience members.^[1]

Grounded in cognitive psychology, the theory of media priming is derived from the associative network model of human memory, in which an idea or concept is stored as a node in the network and is related to other ideas or concepts by semantic paths. Priming refers to the activation of a node in this network, which may serve as a filter, an interpretive frame, or a premise for further information processing or judgment formation.^[2]

General aggression model

The general aggression model (GAM) integrates the priming theory with the social learning theory to describe how previously learned violent behavior may be triggered by thoughts, emotions, or physiological states provoked by media exposure.^[1] However, the GAM has come under considerable criticism in recent years regarding underlying and unproven assumptions and poor data support for the theory.^[3]

Political media priming

Political media priming is "the process in which the media attend to some issues and not others and thereby alter the standards by which people evaluate election candidates".^[4] A number of studies have demonstrated that there is a dimension of powerful media effects that goes beyond agenda setting. In 1982, Iyengar, Peters, and Kinder first identified this added dimension as the “priming effect.”^[5] The theory is founded on the assumption that people do not have elaborate knowledge about political matters and do not take into account all of what they do know when making political decisions — they must consider what more readily comes to mind. Through drawing attention to some aspects of politics at the expense of others, the media might help to set the terms by which political judgments are reached, including evaluations of political figures.^[6] Priming happens when news media suggests to audiences ways and specific issues that should be used to evaluate the performance of leaders and governments.^[7]

Priming is often discussed in tandem with agenda-setting theory that is, it is the continuation of Agenda setting theory. The reason for this association is two-fold. The first, per Hastie & Park, is that both theories revolve around salient information recall, operating on the idea that people will use information that is most readily available when making decisions. The second, per Iyengar and Kinder, is that priming is latter part of a two-fold process with agenda-setting that takes place over time. Once agenda setting has made an issue salient, priming is the process by which "mass media can... shape the considerations that people take into account when making judgements about political candidates or issues". In short, both theories point to ease of accessibility of information in one's mind but priming is something that can occur over a period of time after exposure to a given media segment.^[8]

Researchers also analyze the impact of political media priming through news.^[9] Early findings indicated that political media served to prime audience members, however researchers argue this is due to the increased availability over political media rather than priming.^[9] Rather than analyzing media affecting what people think about, researchers switched their focus to analyzing how political media affects perceived presidential performance.^[9]

Research

Some types of priming are content priming and process priming. Content priming occurs when information is primed and cognitive processes create mental representations of it, influencing a response.^[10] There are many forms of content priming, such as semantic priming, special case priming, evaluative priming, direct priming, indirect priming, etc. Process priming occurs when a prime becomes more available, and thus increases the likelihood of performing the result of the prime.^[10]

Priming isn't always unintentional, as Jacobs and Shapiro demonstrate in a quantitative and historical analysis of John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign. Their research extends the application of priming theory from its original focus of how individuals form attitudes and make decisions to the study of candidate behavior. This new approach, they say, "changes the analytic focus from unintentional priming to intentional priming, namely, the deliberate strategies that candidates pursue to influence voters". Priming can be an effective campaign strategy for presidential candidates, the authors indicate, by a process of carefully calculated uses of public opinion on policy issues to influence voters’ standards for assessing the candidates’ attributes. In this study, the authors focus on the 1960 election because innovative public opinion surveys were incorporated into Kennedy's campaign strategy that enabled him to use position taking to shape his image. Their research was based on primary evidence drawn from archival records and interviews, as well as a combination of interpretative and quantitative analysis. They found that a relationship exists between Kennedy's positions on policy matters and results from his private public opinion surveys. His campaign combined image building with position taking on issues that responded to perceived public opinion. Though this study does neglect questions concerning how and why real politicians use polling results to prime voters, Jacobs and Shapiro effectively demonstrate that the priming process is powerful enough to be used intentionally by political candidates as a tool to influence public opinion during election campaigns.^[11]

In Iyengar, Peters, and Kinder's 1982 study of priming, they set out to determine what effect intentional priming might have on the public's evaluation of president Jimmy Carter. Their hypothesis stated that making certain political topics salient through primetime media, such as defense or spending, would cause viewers to evaluate president Carter based on said topics. The experiment's results demonstrated the phenomena of agenda-setting and priming. First, Iyengar et al. found evidence of agenda-setting in the positive correlation between exposure to a given political topic and its importance when evaluating the president. They then found that said standards affected the actual evaluation of the president's performance, demonstrating priming. This experiment points to the potential of news media to direct the public's attention and perception of political figures, though the researchers also indicate that subjects with higher self-reported levels of knowledge of politics showed decreased effects of priming. This lead Iyengar's team to the conclusion that priming has varied implications depending on an individual's given knowledge prior to political news media exposure.^[5]

Research also indicates that campaigns and media coverage of specific issues can make it seem like there is priming through a two-part process: 1) campaigns and media messages inform audiences about the parties and candidates’ positions and 2) once informed, the audience adopts the position of their preferred party or candidate.^[12] This concept of making political messaging that is favorable to a certain campaign poses an incentive for campaigns and partisan-leaning media outlets to make salient topics that are favorable to the particular side or idea. In these cases it can be a particularly powerful factor, as it engages both society - how a topic is perceived in the wider culture or media, and the individual - how personally relevant the issue is to an individual.

The concept of "spreading activation" has also been explored by media and social science research. Spreading activation refers to a process "whereby media coverage serves to increase the salience of an issue in a person's mind, resulting in that issue being more likely to serve as a standard by which related issues are evaluated."^[13] This theory is predicated on prior "assumptions of attitude accessibility and memory-based models of information processing."^[14] The theory purports that "mental knowledge clusters" are how people organize information they process and perceive, and that these clusters vary in their mental accessibility depending on occurrences at a given moment. Thus these priming models relate back to attitude formation based on the salience of characteristics and factors during decision making.

Replication

There is an ongoing debate over the effectiveness of priming. One limitation of psychological priming studies (an area of research different from what is discussed in this entry) is that their findings struggle to be replicated.^[15] When researchers attempt to replicate another's work and get inconsistent results, it makes the original findings less credible. The reason why priming studies are difficult to replicate is because there are numerous factors that change their results.^[15] These factors are so sensitive that changing the original methodology of the experiment can change the results as well. Some factors that can affect replication are the physical surroundings, individual factors, social factors, etc. Even if priming had the same experimental situations, there is a possibility that people don't respond or react the same way.^[16] Another limitation is that the effects of media priming can fade over time.^[17]

Related Research Articles

Public opinion, or popular opinion, is the collective opinion on a specific topic or voting intention relevant to society. It is the people's views on matters affecting them. The term originates from France, and first appeared in the 17th century, though writers had identified the importance of the opinion of the people long before this. Prior to the advent of mass media, public fora such as coffee houses and gentlemen's clubs were used as exchanges of opinion and some reputable locations had great influence.

The hypodermic needle model is claimed to have been a model of communication in which media consumers were "uniformly controlled by their biologically based 'instincts' and that they react more or less uniformly to whatever 'stimuli' came along".

Agenda-setting theory is one of the most prominent communication theory developed by Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw in 1972 and it describes the way media attempts to influence viewers and establish a hierarchy of news prevalence. It is predicated on the idea that most individuals only have access to one source of information on most issues: the news media. Since they establish the agenda, they may affect how important some things are seen to be.

The spiral of silence theory is a political science and mass communication theory developed by Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann which states that an individual's perception of the distribution of public opinion influences that individual's willingness to express their own opinions. Also known as the theory of public opinion, the spiral of silence theory claims individuals will be more confident and outward with their opinion when they notice that their personal opinion is shared throughout a group. But if the individual notices that his opinion is unpopular with the group he will be more inclined to be reserved and remain silent. In other words, from the individual's perspective, "not isolating himself is more important than his own judgement", meaning his perception of how others in the group perceive him is more important to himself than the need for his opinion to be heard.

In media studies, mass communication, media psychology, communication theory, and sociology, media influence and themedia effect are topics relating to mass media and media culture's effects on individuals' or audiences' thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors. Through written, televised, or spoken channels, mass media reach large audiences. Mass media's role in shaping modern culture is a central issue for the study of culture.

Salience is the state or condition of being prominent. The Oxford English Dictionary defines salience as "most noticeable or important." The concept is discussed in communication, semiotics, linguistics, sociology, psychology, and political science. It has been studied with respect to interpersonal communication, persuasion, politics, and its influence on mass media.

Audience theory offers explanations of how people encounter media, how they use it, and how it affects them. Although the concept of an audience predates media, most audience theory is concerned with people’s relationship to various forms of media. There is no single theory of audience, but a range of explanatory frameworks. These can be rooted in the social sciences, rhetoric, literary theory, cultural studies, communication studies and network science depending on the phenomena they seek to explain. Audience theories can also be pitched at different levels of analysis ranging from individuals to large masses or networks of people.

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Dietram A. Scheufele is a German-American social scientist and the Taylor-Bascom Chair in the Department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is also a Distinguished Research Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center. Prior to joining UW, Scheufele was a tenured faculty member in the Department of Communication at Cornell University.

In the social sciences, framing comprises a set of concepts and theoretical perspectives on how individuals, groups, and societies organize, perceive, and communicate about reality. Framing can manifest in thought or interpersonal communication. Frames in thought consist of the mental representations, interpretations, and simplifications of reality. Frames in communication consist of the communication of frames between different actors. Framing is a key component of sociology, the study of social interaction among humans. Framing is an integral part of conveying and processing data daily. Successful framing techniques can be used to reduce the ambiguity of intangible topics by contextualizing the information in such a way that recipients can connect to what they already know.

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Reinforcement theory is a limited effects media model applicable within the realm of communication. The theory generally states that people seek out and remember information that provides cognitive support for their pre-existing attitudes and beliefs. The main assumption that guides this theory is that people do not like to be wrong and often feel uncomfortable when their beliefs are challenged.

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Mediacracy is a situation in government where the mass media effectively has control over the voting public. Mediacracy is closely related to a theory on the role of media in the United States political system, that argues that media and news outlets have a large level of influence over voting citizens' evaluations of candidates and political issues, thereby possessing effective control over politics in the United States.

Agenda building describes the ongoing process by which various groups attempt to transfer their interests to be the interests of public policymakers. Conceptualized as a political science theory by Cobb and Elder in 1971, "the agenda-building perspective...alerts us to the importance of the environing social processes in determining what occurs at the decision-making stage and what types of policy outcomes will be produced.” It focuses on the relationship between society and policy maker.

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Political cognition refers to the study of how individuals come to understand the political world, and how this understanding leads to political behavior. Some of the processes studied under the umbrella of political cognition include attention, interpretation, judgment, and memory. Most of the advancements in the area have been made by scholars in the fields of social psychology, political science, and communication studies.

References

1 2 Straubhaar, LaRose, Davenport.
↑ Pan, Z. & Kosicki, G.M. (1997). Priming and Media Impact on the Evaluations of the President's Performance. Communication Research.
↑ Ferguson & Dyck (2012). "Paradigm change in aggression research: The time has come to retire the General Aggression Model" (PDF). Aggression and Violent Behavior. 17 (3): 220–228. doi:10.1016/j.avb.2012.02.007. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2013-09-27.
↑ Severin & Tankard, 1997
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↑ Scheufele, Dietram; Tewksbury, David (2007). "Framing, Agenda Setting, and Priming: The Evolution of Three Media Effects Models". Journal of Communication. 57: 9–20. doi:10.1111/j.0021-9916.2007.00326.x.
↑ Scheufele & Tewksbury (2007). "Framing, Agenda Setting, and Priming: The Evolution of Three Media Effects Models". Journal of Communication. 57: 9–20. doi:10.1111/j.0021-9916.2007.00326.x.
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↑ Jacobs and Shapiro (1994)
↑ Lenz, Gabriel (2009). "Learning and Opinion Change, Not Priming: Reconsidering the Priming Hypothesis". American Journal of Political Science. 53 (4): 821–837. doi:10.1111/j.1540-5907.2009.00403.x.
↑ "The American Association for Public Opinion Research Presents the 2009 AAPOR BOOK AWARD to Shanto Iyengar and Donald R. Kinder For News That Matters: Television and American Opinion University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL (1987)". Public Opinion Quarterly. 73 (3): 609. 2009-08-28. doi:10.1093/poq/nfp055. ISSN 0033-362X.
↑ Scheufele, Dietram A. (August 2000). "Agenda-Setting, Priming, and Framing Revisited: Another Look at Cognitive Effects of Political Communication". Mass Communication and Society. 3 (2–3): 297–316. doi:10.1207/s15327825mcs0323_07. ISSN 1520-5436. S2CID 59128739.
1 2 Cesario, Joseph (1 January 2014). "Priming, Replication, and the Hardest Science". Perspectives on Psychological Science. 9 (1): 40–48. doi:10.1177/1745691613513470. PMID 26173239. S2CID 25365263 . Retrieved 16 September 2021.
↑ Grill-Spector, K (2008). "Priming Effect - Memory Systems". ScienceDirect.
↑ Arendt, F (2013). "News Stereotypes, Time, and Fading Priming Effects". Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. 90 (2): 347–362. doi:10.1177/1077699013482907. S2CID 145635996.