Priming Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Priming refers to the effects a stimulus has on a person’s processing of future information. According to Lars Wilnat, “In essence, priming is built on the assumption that the frequency prominence or feature of stimulus activates previously learned cognitive structures and influences interpretations of an ambiguous stimulus.” That is, priming makes the stimulus more accessible, which influences information processing.

Priming is used to explain media effects. For example, television news coverage has been shown to significantly affect the standards by which viewers judge politicians. For example, if the media focuses on the economy, the president will be evaluated on the state of the economy. Some scholars argue that media priming is a result not of attitude accessibility, but rather trust in the media.

Priming also figures prominently in the survey response literature. Survey respondents often base their answers to questions on what is most accessible in memory, which is the result of a prime caused by recent news reports, conversations, or even previous survey questions. Psychologists have explored the underlying mechanisms of priming, revealing that factors such as the intensity, frequency, and recency of the stimulus all affect how and whether a concept or issue can be accessed and applied to a new evaluation. It has further been shown that the priming of one concept will also bring to mind related concepts. Priming is frequently associated with agenda setting—and often dismissed as a variant of agenda setting, or vice versa—since both rely on similar causal mechanisms.

Bibliography:

Wilnat, Lars. “Agenda-setting and Priming: Conceptual Links and Differences.” In Communication and Democracy: Exploring the Intellectual Frontiers in Agenda-setting Theory, edited by Maxwell McCombs, Donlad Shaw, and David Weaver, 51–66. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997.

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