A Story About a Stupid Person Can Make You Act Stupid (or Smart): Behavioral Assimilation (and Contrast) as Narrative Impact

Abstract

Media priming refers to the residual, often unintended consequences of media use on subsequent perceptions, judgments, and behavior. Previous research showed that the media can prime behavior that is in line with the primed traits or concepts (assimilation). However, assimilation is expected to be less likely and priming may even yield reverse effects (contrast) when recipients have a dissimilarity testing mindset. Based on previous research on narrative comprehension and experience as well as research on media priming, a short-term influence of stories on cognitive performance is predicted. In an experimental study, participants (N = 81) read a story about a stupid soccer hooligan. As expected, participants who read the story without a special processing instruction performed worse in a knowledge test than a control group who read an unrelated text. Participants with a reading goal instruction to find dissimilarities between the self and the main protagonist performed better than participants who read the story without this instruction. The effects of reported self-activation and story length were further considered. Future inquiries with narratives as primes and contrast effects in media effects research are discussed.

Notes

^a Dummy coding 0 = short text, 1 = long text.

^b dummy coding 0 = default instruction, 1 = dissimilarity testing instruction.

***p < .001

**p < .01

*p < .05.

1. Apparently, the (former) fashion model Claudia Schiffer was (and maybe still is) associated with low intellectual ability in the Netherlands where this study was conducted.

2. This is a critical distinction from persuasion effects, which are supposed to be more stable than priming outcomes. Persuasive effects of a fictional narrative were even found to increase over time (Appel & Richter, 2007; see also Appel, 2008).

3. The negative prefix of this regression weight was unexpected. However, we are cautious in interpreting this trend-significant finding. A graphic analysis of the data identified one multivariate outlier that drove this trend-significant interaction effect among readers of the short-story versions. Excluding this outlier, the interaction observed for the short-story version is nonsignificant, B = −0.31, SE _B = 0.35, t = −0.90, p = .38, ΔR ² = .03. Excluding this outlier, the results of the three-way interaction are trend significant with B = 0.35, SE _B = 0.19, t = 1.84, p = .07, ΔR ² = .05. Additional exploratory analyses addressed the relationship between transportation and performance depending on the processing mode. For the longer versions, the descriptive data point at a negative association between transportation and cognitive performance in the default condition, and a positive association between transportation and cognitive performance in the dissimilarity testing condition. This interaction was not significant, however, with B = 0.40, SE _B = 0.32, t = 1.25, p > .20, ΔR ² = .04.

4. Short-term effects of media use on cognitive performance were also demonstrated in one study on stereotype threat (Steele & Aronson, 1995) that used television commercials as primes (Davies, Spencer, Quinn, & Gerhardstein, 2002, Study 1). Stereotype threat differs from the priming effects outlined here in crucial regards: Stereotype threat is a psychological state of stress and cognitive load that is likely when a negative stereotype of one's own group is activated (e.g., “women are bad at math”), and the target person identifies with the group (women) as well as with the task (“I do fairly well at math”; Schmader, Johns, & Forbes, 2008).