Citation

Arendt F. Journal. Mass Commun. Q. 2013; 90(2): 347-362.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2013, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication)

DOI

10.1177/1077699013482907

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The content of the mass media and its possible effects on recipients have been investigated by social scientists for decades. As a special case, short-term effects of the content of mass media on people's later behavior or judgments have often been studied in media priming research. Media priming is a reliable effect with effect sizes ranging from r = .08 (political priming) to r = .30 (media violence) according to a meta-analysis. Although there are differences in what is investigated with regard to "priming" among cognitive psychologists, social psychologists, and media effects researchers (and even between political and media violence priming researchers), there are highly visible similarities: at a general level, priming refers to the short-term impact of exposure to a (mass-mediated) stimulus on subsequent judgments or behaviors.

Although there is evidence that the media priming effect fades with time, we lack empirical evidence from experimental designs. We investigated the media priming effect of reading crime tabloid articles that overrepresented foreigners as criminals on a subsequent real-world reality judgment (i.e., estimated frequency of criminal foreigners). We utilized a factorial experimental design (N = 465) with the between-subjects factors treatment and temporal delay of the postmeasurement. We found that the media priming effect followed an exponential decay function and that vigilance (i.e., the tendency to intensify the intake and processing of threat-relevant information) moderated the decay.

Language: en