Cuing and Priming

Directors can use many techniques to signal that a specific element of a media story is important. For example, placing a spotlight on an object or having a camera zoom in on the object makes the object more salient so that people are more likely to notice it. Cuing the object signals the audience to pay particular attention to this object in the future. Media psychologists would argue that the cue operates to prime a particular object or person. Priming refers to the effect of some preceding stimulus or event on how we react to some subsequent event or person. The effect is analogous to what happens when a water well is primed. Priming the well enables it to produce water when it is pumped at a later time. As applied to the media, priming refers to the effects of the content of the media (e.g., extensive coverage of certain political stories, depictions of violence, the use of brief “teasers” about an upcoming story on a newscast) on people's later behavior or judgments (e.g., evaluations of the president, aggressive behavior, attention to news stories related to the teaser).

There are three important characteristics of priming. First, the effect of a prime dissipates with time. Typically, the effects of a prime on social judgments fade within 20 to 30 minutes (but may last up to an hour). Second, primes that are more intense will tend to have stronger effects on people's judgments and behavior. Third, primes tend to have stronger effects when a situation is more ambiguous. For example, if I have just watched a violent TV show, I am more likely to interpret someone's accidentally bumping into me as intentional and to react with hostility than if I had just watched a nonviolent show such as Sesame Street.

Cognitive and social psychologists have used priming paradigms since the early 1970s to study various aspects of the cognitive system. Given the extensive research on priming within social and cognitive psychology, it is not surprising that priming has been found useful as an explanation of a number of the effects of the media on people's thoughts, beliefs, [Page 225]judgments, and behavior. For several reasons, the characteristics of the media make it a likely source of priming. First, the ubiquitous nature of the media in our lives makes it a powerful tool for priming various concepts—often outside our awareness—that may influence how we interpret later information. In particular, situations in which we have the TV on but are not paying particular attention to it are ideal for priming because explicit awareness of a prime often mitigates the influence of the prime. Second, particular types of media, most notably the news, are well suited to act as primes. A typical newscast will cover a wide variety of topics that may result in the priming of a correspondingly wide variety of concepts. Such priming increases the likelihood that one of the primed items will influence how we interpret later ambiguous information. In addition, any particular story (e.g., the war in Iraq or President Clinton's sexual liaisons) will receive extensive coverage across time, which may result in related concepts (foreign policy or sexual indiscretion) being primed for an extended period of time.

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