Week Three: Media Effects on Behavior and Attitudes

1. WEEK THREE: MEDIA EFFECTS
ON BEHAVIOR AND ATTITUDES
POL 367 – Mass Media and Politics

2. Agenda Control
 “May not be successful most of the time in telling people what
to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what
to think about.” – Bernard Cohen
 There are three main ways that media is capable of influencing
what people think about:
 Agenda Setting
 Priming
 Framing

3. Agenda Setting
 By giving differential attention to certain issues, media sets the
agenda of public discourse.
 The more attention given to an issue, the more important
people perceive it as being important:
 Institutional: government officials, elites perceive as important
 Public: affects what citizens think is important
 Is most potent on issues not already widely discussed and is
beyond people’s personal experiences.

4. Agenda Setting: Perception of Crime

5. Priming
 Media affects criteria by which political leaders are judged.
More prominent an issue, the more it will influence assessment.
 Cognitive processes:
 Increases accessibility of knowledge, more likely to use
 Increases weight of knowledge on decision making
 Differs from persuasion:
 Persuasion – changing perception and attitude
 Priming – changes issues are given weight in decision

8. Framing
 Media can influence opinion about an issue by how they
emphasize or de-emphasize different facets of an issue
 Categories of framing (Iyengar)
 Equivalency versus Emphasis
 Different but logically equivalent words to describe same event
 Highlighting different subsets of potentially relevant considerations
 Episodic versus Thematic
 Depicts issues in terms of individual instances or events
 Places events within larger social, cultural, political context

9. Framing: Nelson, Clawson, & Oxley (1997)

10. Framing: Neuman, Just, & Crigler (1992)
 Common Media Frames:
 Economic Frame – discussion of impact on bottom line, profit,
capitalism
 Conflict Frame – individuals and groups as polarized forces, battle
 Powerlessness Frame – individuals & groups helpless to larger
forces
 Human Impact Frame – Describing impact on individuals and groups
 Morality Frame – Indirect references to moral and cultural frame
 Conflict Frame is the most prevalent in American news media.

11. Socialization
 The transmission of and internalization of a society’s cultural
value, ideologies, and beliefs.
 Sources of socialization:
 Parents
 School
 Groups (ex: groups)
 Media was often ignored but is now seen as a major source of
socialization

12. Ex: Attitudes Towards Lesbian and Gay
Individuals
 Jeremiah Garretson:
 Positive exposure to lesbian
& gay individuals in media
one mechanism to explain
positive attitudes towards
homosexuals among youth.
 Also encouraged more
LGBT individuals to “come
out”, increasing personal
contact.

13. Socialization Across Age Groups
 Children
 Consumption of media – often media originally intended for adults – dramatically
increases as children grow up.
 Children’s brains are primed for learning, apt to take information at face value.
 Teenage
 Teenagers mention media as major source of information.
 Piaget: complex reasoning skills fully develop during teenage years.
 Increased skepticism towards authority figures
 Adulthood
 Political attitudes are mostly stabilized: learning is mostly supplemental
 Entertainment is major source of socialization
 More likely to rely on media in cases where personal experience or social contacts are
minimal

14. Theories of Media Choice: Use and
Gratification
 Individuals ignore personally irrelevant and unattractive
presented messages. Prefer things that are useful and
intellectually or emotionally gratifying, given time and effort
constraints
 Three categories of motivations:
 Curiosity and surveillance
 Entertainment and escape
 Social and psychological adjustment

15. Theories of Media Choice: Selective
Exposure
 Cognitive balance
 Avoid information that disturbs peace of mind, offends taste, or conflicts
with prior attitudes
 Partisan selective exposure
 Motivated selection of pro-attitudinal messages and motivated avoidance
of counter-attitudinal messages
 Social media allows for incidental exposure if networks are diverse.
 Partisan media usually covers the same stories, difference in the
valence, framing, etc.

16. Selective Exposure in 2016 Election

17. Avoidance of News: Marcus Prior
 “Conditional Learning”
 Knowledge dependent on
interest in news and
politics
 Gap in knowledge
between high and low
interest people driven by
greater media choice.
 Easier to avoid news or
only choose pro-
attitudinal news

18. Learning
 People have developed ideas and feelings about how the
world works. These configurations are called schemas or
scripts.
 Help to assimilate new information
 More knowledgeable individuals have more developed
schemas (ex: ideology) and better able to absorb
information.
 However, more knowledgeable individuals usually also hardest
to persuade, engage in more motivated reasoning

19. News & Personal Experience (Bennet)
 To reduce information processing, people use a variety of
strategies:
 Cueing – look for cues or labels, such as party id, endorsements,
etc.
 Bolstering – Selecting information to support positions attached to
cues
 Weighing – Using emotions attached to cues to direct attention &
learning
 Personal Organizing – Filter information into central organizing
principles

20. Factual Learning
 American factual knowledge on politics is routinely reported as
low.
 Low factual knowledge, however, may not necessarily be a bad
thing:
 Follow up questions usually show greater understanding of issues
 News stories may leave general impressions and emotions even if
specific facts that created those impressions are forgotten (online-
processing model)

21. Deterrents to Learning
 Lack of interest in politics
 Distrust in media
 Information overload
 Constant sense of crisis
 Information presented in disconnected snippets
 Information presented too short, too fast
 Little time to process information presented