Political experts resist media priming because dense prior knowledge absorbs new information

Evidence

Compared to novices, experts know more about a particular domain; and their knowledge is better organized (Fiske & Kinder, 1981). Political experts and novices may react differently to changes in the media’s agenda for a number of reasons: (1) because their knowledge is denser and better organized, experts possess a greater and more flexible ability to deal with new information and to interpret it in ways consistent with their prior convictions (Fiske, Kinder, & Larter, 1983); (2) because experts possess more informational support for their beliefs, they may be harder to budge; and (3) drawing attention to a particular aspect of national life may only remind experts of what they already know. In a pair of early experiments, experts were indeed relatively immune to priming by television news (Iyengar et al., 1984). But in subsequent experiments (reported in Iyengar & Kinder, 1987) this result disappeared, so the significance of expertise in conditioning the impact of news coverage is presently unclear. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1580

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the general ‘experts harder to budge’ literature and to motivated reasoning material in earlier chapters of this volume. — connects to: New media expose more climate science while shrinking comprehension needed to act on it. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 844
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does expertise shield against priming or merely change which frames are effective?