Media Priming: An Updated Synthesis

Abstract

At a very general level, media priming refers to the short-term impact of exposure to the media on subsequent judgments or behaviors. Of course, what constitutes “short-term” varies depending on the research domain. In the last edition of this volume, we argued that the research on media priming had shifted its focus from whether media priming exists to testing of specific theories, and that this was a valuable trend because of the lack of clear theoretical models at that time (Roskos-Ewoldsen, Roskos-Ewoldsen, & Carpentier, 2002). While this shift in focus was accurate in our previous chapter, more recently research has tended to focus more on the different contexts in which priming occurs. So, for example, the research on priming violence and priming has shifted from a focus on TV and movies as a source of priming to a focus on video games as a source. Likewise, political priming has focused on how movies, TV series, and TV comedy can result in political priming effects. Finally, the impact of media priming of racial stereotypes has emerged as a major research focus in this area. So, the research on media priming has gone from a focus on whether media priming exists to how media priming works to how widespread a phenomenon media priming is. In this chapter we discuss three areas of research on media priming. Then we discuss theoretical models of priming. We conclude by continuing the argument we raised in the last edition, that traditional psychological explanations of priming (i.e., priming within network models of memory) has limited our progress towards understanding media priming. Instead, we suggest that a focus on how people comprehend media messages and the resulting mental representations provides a better explanation for media priming.