Us and Them: The Role of Group Identity in Explaining Cultural Resonance and Framing Effects

ABSTRACT

This study investigates the importance of group identity as a determinant of cultural resonance in news framing effects research. Two parallel survey experiments were conducted in the United States and Britain; respondents received a news story about a military atrocity attributed to either American or British soldiers during the war in Afghanistan. In one condition, the story contained only basic facts about the incident. In the other, the story included frames reinforcing the national identity of the accused nation, including: (a) downplaying the incident; (b) denigrating the transgressors; and (c) redirecting attention toward positive aspects of the nation. We find that these frames tend to be more powerful when protecting ingroup (versus outgroup) identity. The reason, we argue, is due to their cultural resonance, not simply the factual information that they make salient. More broadly, our results offer important insights into the framing process, illuminating the psychological mechanisms that help explain how cultural resonance can facilitate specific responses among audiences, particularly in response to group identity threats.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the University of Nebraska-Kearney for providing a collaborative research grant that facilitated this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ It is debatable whether a truly “unframed” message can exist; every story is told from a certain angle, and every set of facts presents a certain lens on an issue. However, we refer to the control condition as “unframed” relative to the framed condition—the latter involves distinct identity-protective frames, whereas the control condition merely recounts the alleged events without any explanation or crisis management.

² Despite the differences in length of stimulus—which, to a certain extent, are unavoidable given the complexity of designing a plausible control condition that neither reaffirms the national identity at stake in the message, nor provides more factual details that would fundamentally change the manipulation—analyses show that respondents did not spend significantly more time participating in the experiment in the framed versus control conditions (though completion time by itself should not be taken as an indication of survey performance (Malhotra, 2008), nor are these data sufficiently complete to conduct a proper analysis for our datasets). Perhaps more importantly, we did not see any difference in the priming of respondents’ national attachment, which was an essential component of the theoretical mechanisms at play. Reported national attachment was statistically identical between the framed and control conditions (5.20 (control, SD = 1.7) versus 5.25 (framed, SD = 1.6); t = .599, df = 1585.6, p = .549. Notably, this is a fairly high reported mean score on the measure, which suggests that both messages were capable of priming national attachment despite varying lengths.

³ IRB application number: 031815-4, University of Nebraska at Kearney, approval granted March 19, 2015.

⁴ Respondents were most likely to reject the message in the British control condition (N = 33). We ran all analyses with these additional 83 respondents included. Analyses for H1a-c are nearly identical. Analyses for H2/H3, however, differ: the effects of the ingroup frames on Embarrassment/Shame and on Reaffirmation are no longer significant. Similarly, the mediation results are also insignificant with these message rejecters included. We debated at length how to interpret these findings and proceed. While a self-reported total rejection of the message (as “not at all believable”) could, at face value, be taken as a form of identity protection—that is, one rejects a message about one’s group (indeed, 24 of the 33 rejecters in the UK control condition were UK citizens) because one finds it so unpalatable—the findings for this particular subgroup do not suggest this to be the case. If the rejection were a form of group protection, we should find even stronger effects of the frames, which alleviate that group identity discomfort, among this subset of respondents. This is not the case. Furthermore, we ran the analyses with the bottom two response categories, and the bottom three response categories (all below the mid-point of the scale) excluded. In this case, the results remain similar to the exclusion of just the bottom category—in some cases, the findings are slightly stronger, but always directionally identical. Given the similarity among these categories of message “doubters,” and their distinct difference from those true message “rejecters” (who answered “not at all believable”), we chose to continue with only the lowest group dropped, because that answer option does seem conceptually different to us than to have rated a non-labeled 2 or 3 on that 6-point scale. For transparency, side-by-side analysis comparisons with these 83 respondents are available in the digital-only supplemental file. Analyses with the full sample, and the various sub-samples based on these exclusions, are also available from the corresponding author.

⁵ EmbShame: Overall F = 12.63, df(3,1), p < .001; interaction term F(ingroup*framed) = 0.382, p = .537; Disassociation: Overall F = 10.57, df(3,1), p < .001; interaction term F(ingroup*framed) = 0.901, p = .341; Reaffirmation: Overall F = 19.92, df(3,1), p < .001; interaction term F(ingroup*framed) = 0.227, p = .634.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Nebraska-Kearney [Collaborative Research Grant].

Notes on contributors

Penelope Sheets

Penelope Sheets is a senior lecturer in the Department of Communication Science at the University of Amsterdam. Her research and teaching focus on political communication, (data) journalism, and public opinion, with a particular interest in the role national, racial, religious and other group identities play in the construction and flow of news, as well as how group identity affects citizens’ responses to political communication.

Charles M. Rowling

Charles M. Rowling is a professor of political science at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. His research focuses on the role of political communication, news coverage, and public opinion in U.S. foreign policy. Much of his work has examined these dynamics in the context of national identity.

Jason Gilmore

Jason Gilmore is an associate professor of global communication at Utah State University. His research examines the strategic creation, dissemination, and effects of particularly potent national and international ideas—such as American exceptionalism, patriotism, anti-Americanism—that are regularly communicated within and across national borders.

Niklas Melcher

Niklas Melcher completed his research master degree at the University of Amsterdam with a focus on political communication, globalization and intercultural connections. Nowadays, he works in market research in the cultural industries.