Real-world dramatic events outside the lab trigger media priming effects on presidential evaluation

Evidence

The disclosure that high officials within the Reagan administration had covertly diverted to the Nicaraguan Contras funds obtained from the secret sale of weapons to Iran provides us with a splendid opportunity to examine how the foundations of popular support shift when dramatic events occur According to our theory of priming, the more attention media pay to a particular domain—the more the public is primed with it—the more citizens will incorporate what they know about that domain into their overall judgment of the president. Data from the 1986 National Election Study confirm that intervention in Central America loomed larger in the public’s assessment of President Reagan’s performance after the Iran-Contra disclosure than before. Priming was most pronounced for aspects of public opinion most directly implicated by the news coverage, more apparent in political novices’ judgments than political experts’, and stronger in the evaluations of Reagan’s overall performance than in assessments of his character. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1564

Categorization

• XREF: Confirms the priming effects from the experimental studies in this same chapter generalize to a natural experiment (Iran-Contra), extending the controlled lab findings. — connects to: Search query data reveals real-world events before traditional media does — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 233; Media agenda shifts alter the political weight the public assigns to events over time — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology: Key Readings, 1626