Political Trust in a Cynical Age

This article reviews recent survey-based research on citizens’ trust in government, focusing particularly on the United States. It addresses the long-term decline in trust and potential causes for this decline, with an emphasis on the effects of partisanship, polarization, performance, process, and media priming. While dispositions can anchor trust levels, the dominant research findings show that the sources of variation and change in trust are political, if multifaceted, in nature. We discuss new versions of standard measures, call for a renewed look at the distinction between trust in authorities and trust in the regime, review ongoing work on how and why trust matters, and recommend broadening the foci of mistrust to include antiestablishment sentiments and attacks on electoral integrity. How trust intervenes between perceptions of political processes and compliance with authoritative commands is a critical domain for additional research. We conclude with a caveat against confidence that the decline in trust can be quickly or easily reversed.

Priming as a Process and as a Function in Agenda Setting

This paper explores the priming mechanism in agenda setting in conjunction with information processing and other variables such as relevance and mental models. Over the years, certain confusion started to accumulate about what is a place of priming in the media effects realm in general and in agenda setting in particular. Moreover, new advances in the psychology studies of priming and in media priming were not accounted for in agenda setting. The paper aims at a) reviewing what developments in the field have taken place over the years, and b) revisiting and clarifying priming in its specific application to public agenda setting based on the new developments.The paper concludes with a new working definition of priming and describes a more complex theoretical framework of priming that shows how mental models and relevance explain priming effects better than accessibility only in deliberative information processes, and that even in more automatic, peripheral processing, accessibility plays a role as only an initial trigger for further issue or performance evaluations.

The ways of using mass media to influence the foreign policy agenda in a democratic and non-democratic state

In the article the ways of mass media use to influence the perception of foreign policy by domestic and foreign public are reviewed. In particular, the features of applying such methods of mass media influence on public opinion as informing, priming, and propaganda by democratic and undemocratic countries are examined. Keywords: Foreign policy, impact on public opinion, mass media, priming, propaganda

Media Priming Effect: A Preregistered Replication Experiment

Iyengar et al. (1984, The Evening News and Presidential Evaluations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 46(4): 778–87) discovered the media priming effect, positing that by drawing attention to certain issues while ignoring others, television news programs help define the standards by which presidents are evaluated. We conducted a direct replication of Experiment 1 by Iyengar et al. (1984, The Evening News and Presidential Evaluations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 46(4): 778–87) with some changes. Specifically, we (a) collected data from Japanese undergraduates; (b) reduced the number of conditions to two; (c) used news coverage of the issue of relocating US bases in Okinawa as the treatment; (d) measured issue-specific evaluations of the Japanese Prime Minister in the pre-treatment questionnaire; and (e) performed statistical analyses that are more appropriate for testing heterogeneity in the treatment effect. We did not find statistically significant evidence of media priming. Overall, the results suggest that the effects of media priming may be quite sensitive either to the media environment or to differences in populations in which the effect has been examined.

Impulsive Facial-Threat Perceptions After Exposure to Stereotypic Crime News

Tests were performed to learn whether exposure to news about crimes committed by dark-skinned criminals increases impulsive facial-threat perceptions of meeting dark-skinned strangers in a subsequent situation (media-priming hypothesis), but only when the facial displays are ambiguous (ambiguity hypothesis). The assumption is that news stereotypes prime the “dark-skinned criminal” stereotype, which, in turn, influences subsequent face processing. An experiment with two groups was used to test this prediction. Participants allocated to the treatment group ( n = 53) read about crimes committed by dark-skinned criminals. In contrast, for the control group ( n = 52), cues indicating skin color were not mentioned at all. As predicted, the treatment increased the perceived facial threat of dark-skinned strangers, but only when the facial displays were ambiguous. Given the importance of the face in social interaction, I discuss important, real-world implications for recipients as well as for journalists and media organizations.