Page 120 - Media Effects Advances in Theory and Research

5. MEDIA PRIMING 109

campaigns focused on rational health appeals. These rational appeals
highlight the aversive consequences of a particular disease (e.g., AIDS or
breast cancer) or behavior (e.g., binge drinking) and the risk of the aver-
sive consequence occurring unless a particular course of action is taken,
such as practicing safe sex, performing breast self-exams, or stopping
binge drinking (see Floyd, Prentice-Dunn, & Rogers, 2000; Rogers, 1983;
Witte, 1994, 1995). They focus on our ability to think and make decisions
about the issues rationally. The stereotype priming model shifts away
from this approach by maintaining that the media can also influence
behavior by priming preexisting negative stereotypes of people who
engage in the risky behavior or positive stereotypes of people who engage
in the desired behavior. For example, a commercial might prime negative
stereotypes of people who drink and drive (e.g., they are irresponsible or
reckless with other people’s lives). The model further maintains that the
activation of these negative stereotypes in turn leads to impression man-
agement behaviors (e.g., if I drink and drive, I’m irresponsible).
Although the stereotype priming model incorporates media priming, it
was not intended to explain media priming per se. Rather, it was intended
to demonstrate how the phenomenon of priming can be used to elucidate
how health appeals in the media can more effectively be used to effect
adaptive behaviors (e.g., quitting smoking). As a result, it is vague in
terms of the exact mechanisms of priming.

Summary and Conclusions

At one level, the theoretical development that has occurred in the area of
media priming is impressive. There are currently five models that have
been proposed to explain the cognitive processes that result in media
priming: Berkowitz’s (1984) neo-associationistic model; Anderson et al.’s
(1995) affective aggression model; the availability heuristic explanation of
political media priming; Price and Tewksbury’s (1997) network model of
political priming; and Pechmann’s (2001) stereotype priming model (but
see comments in the previous section). Three of these models
(Berkowitz’s, Anderson et al.’s, and Price and Tewksbury’s) rely directly
on network models of memory to explain media priming. All three of the
network models of media priming predict that the intensity and recency
of the priming event should influence the magnitude of the prime on sub-
sequent behavior. However, there have been no empirical tests of these
assumptions within the domain of media priming (Roskos-Ewoldsen et
al., in press). In reading the literature on media priming, one gets the
impression that media scholars identified the concept of priming in cogni-
tive and social psychology and used it to explain their media effects
metaphorically, but were not particularly interested in testing whether
media priming is, in fact, a result of priming in a network model.