Priming Theory

Cognitive and social psychologists have used priming paradigms since the early 1970s to study how humans process information and how that remembered information affects our behavior. As applied to the media, priming refers to the effects of the content in the media on people's later behavior or judgments. Priming has been used extensively to study the shortterm effects of media violence and stereotyped portrayals of minorities and the long-term effects of political coverage on evaluations of a candidate.

Priming procedures were first used to explore the representation of information in memory. Some theories of memory, such as network models of memory, assume that information is stored in memory in the form of nodes and that each node represents a unique idea (e.g., there is a “Big Bird” node in memory). Furthermore, these nodes are connected to related nodes in memory by associative pathways (e.g., “Big Bird” is linked to Sesame Street or “Cookie Monster” or “the Muppets” but probably is not directly linked to “President Herbert Hoover”). Also, it is believed that each node has what is called an activation threshold.[Page 672]If the node's level of activation exceeds its threshold, the node fires, and energy flows down network pathways from the node to other related nodes. For example, if the Big Bird node fires, activation spreads to related nodes, such as Cookie Monster. Once a related node is activated (in this example, Cookie Monster), it then requires less additional activation for it to fire. This means that the concept has been primed.

Cognitive psychologists have shown that the activation level of a node will dissipate over time if no additional source of activation is present. Eventually, given no more activation, the activation level of the node returns to its resting state, and it is no longer considered to be activated. In tasks that involve judgments or evaluations of a social stimulus, the priming effect will last up to 15 to 20 minutes and possibly up to 1 hour.

Social and developmental psychologists began using priming procedures in the late 1970s to study person perception, stereotyping, and attitude activation. For example, Graham and Hudley (1994) had middle school boys read a set of 10 sentences. For half of the boys, 8 of the 10 sentences dealt with negative outcomes that were under the control of the child in the sentence. For the other boys, 8 of the 10 sentences described the same outcome, but the child in the sentence was not responsible for the outcome. After completing this priming task, participants took part in what they thought was a second, unrelated study. In that study, participants were asked to imagine that they were at a water fountain and another student knocked into them, and they got water all over their shirt. The scenario was set up so that it was ambiguous whether the bump was deliberate or not. As predicted by priming theory, the boys who had read the sentences where the child was responsible for the negative outcome were more likely to judge that the child intentionally got them wet at the water fountain than were the boys who read the sentences where the child was not responsible for the negative outcome. In research of the priming effect, typically, the ambiguous information is biased toward the primes.

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