PSYC 342 Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: Political Campaign, Advantageous, John Zaller

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 342
• Professor: Leandre R Fabrigar

Document Summary

Miller & krosnick (2000: argues that issue priming not purely an accessibility driven phenomenon, but a more complex process. High political knowledge can facilitate understanding, storage, and retrieval of information from news. Trust in media will facilitate acceptance of information. Argues priming greatest for high political knowledge/high trust in media people: experiment 1: For participants high in knowledge and media trust: Exposure to news stories increased perceived national importance of issue and increased reliance on that issue in presidential performance evaluations. Perceived national importance mediated the effect of exposure on issue priming in this group: experiment 2. Presidential performance on issues and in general. Only participants high in knowledge and media trust showed issue priming effect. No evidence that accessibility (how quickly people are capable in evaluating an issue) of issues mediated this effect. Empirical finding that episodic vs thematic news stories can alter viewers(cid:495) beliefs regarding responsibility for problems facing the country (e. g. individual vs societal causes)