dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

Parsimony versus precision: framing, agenda setting, and priming

The three models we focus on in this issue—framing, agenda setting, and priming—

have received significant scholarly attention since they were introduced.

Agenda setting refers to the idea that there is a strong correlation between the

emphasis that mass media place on certain issues (e.g., based on relative placement or amount of coverage) and the importance attributed to these issues by

mass audiences (McCombs & Shaw, 1972). As defined in the political communication literature, Priming refers to ‘‘changes in the standards that people use to

make political evaluations’’ (Iyengar & Kinder, 1987, p. 63). Priming occurs when

news content suggests to news audiences that they ought to use specific issues as

benchmarks for evaluating the performance of leaders and governments. It is

often understood as an extension of agenda setting. There are two reasons for

this: (a) Both effects are based on memory-based models of information processing. These models assume that people form attitudes based on the considerations

that are most salient (i.e., most accessible) when they make decisions (Hastie &

Park, 1986). In other words, judgments and attitude formation are directly correlated with ‘‘the ease in which instances or associations could be brought to

mind’’ (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973, p. 208); (b) based on the common theoretical foundation, some researchers have argued that priming is a temporal extension of agenda setting (Iyengar & Kinder, 1987). By making some issues more

salient in people’s mind (agenda setting), mass media can also shape the considerations that people take into account when making judgments about political

candidates or issues (priming).

Framing differs significantly from these accessibility-based models. It is based on

the assumption that how an issue is characterized in news reports can have an

influence on how it is understood by audiences. ==Framing is often traced back to

roots in both psychology and sociology (Pan & Kosicki, 1993). The psychological

origins of framing lie in experimental work by Kahneman and Tversky (1979, 1984),

for which Kahneman received the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics (Kahneman, 2003).

They examined how different presentations of essentially identical decision-making

scenarios influence people’s choices and their evaluation of the various options==

presented to them. The sociological foundations of framing were laid by Goffman

(1974) and others who assumed that individuals cannot understand the world fully

and constantly struggle to interpret their life experiences and to make sense of the

world around them. In order to efficiently process new information, Goffman