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4. MEDIA CONSUMPTION AND PERCEPTIONS OF SOCIAL REALITY 75

evaluative judgments. In those experiments, which tested aspects of the
Socratic effect (thinking about logically related beliefs makes those beliefs
more consistent; McGuire, 1960), they showed that the accessibility of
beliefs relating to premises increased the consistency between the beliefs
in the premises and beliefs in the conclusions.

Judgments of Set Size and Probability. Set-size judgments pertain to
judgments of the extent to which a particular category occurs within a
larger, superordinate category (e.g., the percentage of women [subordi-
nate category] in the U.S. population [superordinate category]; Manis,
Shedler, Jonides, & Nelson, 1993). Probability judgments pertain to esti-
mates of likelihood. A finding that has been documented consistently is
the relation between the accessibility of a construct and judgments of set
size and probability (Sherman & Corty, 1984). In their seminal work on
the availability heuristic, Tversky and Kahneman (1973) demonstrated that
people tend to infer the frequency of a class or the probability of occur-
rence on the ease with which a relevant example can be recalled. For
example, participants in one experiment estimated that words beginning
with k occur more frequently in the English language than words having k
as the third letter, even though the opposite is true. Presumably, words
beginning with k are easier to recall because of how words tend to be
organized in memory (by initial letters).

Media Effects and Accessibility Consequences

The three types of judgments just discussed, and their relation to accessi-
bility, by no means exhaust the discussion of the types of judgments that
have been shown to be influenced by the accessibility of information (for
a review, see Higgins & King, 1981). Rather, those judgments are singled
out because of their relevance to the types of judgments that are typically
used in media effects studies.

Effects of News Reports on Issue Perceptions. One domain in which
information accessibility has been implicated is that of how information
about particular issues presented in news reports (e.g., television, news-
papers) affects judgments about those issues (e.g., attitudes, likelihood
estimates). For example, research by Zillmann and colleagues has shown
that information presented in the form of exemplars (e.g., case studies,
vivid examples) tends to influence judgments to a greater degree than
does more accurate but pallid base-rate information (for a review, see
chapter 2). This general finding has been replicated for a variety of exem-
plar conditions, including manipulating the proportion of exemplars
that are consistent with a story’s focus (Zillmann, Gibson, Sundar, &