Priming Predispositions and Changing Policy Positions: An Account of When Mass Opinion Is Primed or Changed

Abstract

Prior research provides limited insights into when political communications prime or change citizens' underlying opinions. This article helps fill that void by putting forth an account of priming and opinion change. I argue that crystallized attitudes should often be primed by new information. An influx of attention to less crystallized preferences, however, should lead individuals to alter their underlying opinions in accordance with prior beliefs. Since predispositions acquired early in the life cycle-such as partisanship, religiosity, basic values, and group-based affect/antagonisms-are more crystallized than mass opinion about public policy, media and campaign content will tend to prime citizens' predispositions and change their policy positions. Both my review of previous priming research and original analyses presented in this study from five new cases strongly support the crystallization-based account of when mass opinion is primed or changed. I conclude with a discussion of the article's potential political, methodological, and normative implications. Priming versus Opinion ChangeN ot only is projection a plausible alternative interpretation [to priming], it is an alternative with real consequence. The political differences between priming and projection are enormous. If priming holds, then television news possesses the capacity to alter the standards by which a president is judged, and therefore the degree of public popularity a president enjoys and the power he can wield. If projection holds, then we will have discovered that people interpret new events or reinterpret old events in order to maintain consistency with their existing predispositions-an interesting discovery, though hardly a new one (e.g., Abelson 1959)

Approaches to Studying Policy Representation

“…However, merely because adding one additional dimension does not capture a great deal of the heterogeneity of Americans' issue preferences does not mean that additional dimensions do not exist; it merely means that there is not any one particularly large secondary influence common across all Americans . This logic can be seen by considering a placebo test: a factor analysis of Census‐tract‐level correlates of socioeconomic status such as race, income, education rates, and marriage rates produces one large dimension because all these variables correlate moderately; but, this does not mean that race and marital status are “actually the same thing.” Similarly, there may be hundreds of “dimensions” to Americans' policy preferences—some might favor universal health care because of a personal experience with an insurance provider, for example, and others may oppose gay marriage due to their religious convictions (Tesler ). Simply because there is no single particular factor that competes in strength with the first dimension does not mean that such factors collectively matter little and that “views on gay marriage” and “views on abortion” are “actually the same thing.” As Figure makes clear, there are many issues on which Americans have persistent views yet they do not have strong relationships with other policy domains.…”

“… See also Canes‐Wrone and Shotts (), Hill (), and Gilens and Page () in recent literature on representation and Kinder and Kam () and Tesler () in recent literature on public opinion.…”

The Causal Effects of Elite Position‐Taking on Voter Attitudes: Field Experiments with Elite Communication

“…Future studies should also examine which constituents are most likely to be affected. We also expect that these patterns may certainly differ across issues, such as moral issues that clearly implicate citizens' core values (e.g., Carmines and Stimson 1980;Ryan 2014;Tesler 2015) or that citizens find particularly personally important (e.g., Krosnick 1990). Likewise, competing communication may well change these effects (Chong and Druckman 2007b).…”

Authoritarianism, Affective Polarization, and Economic Ideology

“… Tesler's () work on the spillover of racial attitudes onto healthcare opinion in the Obama era is similar in this respect, as is Kahan and Braman's () conceptualization of cultural cognition. In Tesler's work, racial attitudes become linked to seemingly unrelated issues, because Obama is a persistent prime for racial attitudes, and because citizens use what amounts to an affect heuristic in deciding whom to believe at the elite level.…”