Media Frames and Cognitive Accessibility: What Do “Global Warming” and “Climate Change” Evoke in Partisan Minds?

Abstract

Decades of research demonstrate that how the public thinks about a given issue is affected by how it is framed by the media. Typically, studies of framing vary how an issue is portrayed (often, by altering the text of written communication) and compare subsequent beliefs, attitudes, or preferences—taking a framing effect as evidence that a media frame (or frame in communication) instantiated a particular audience frame (or frame in thought). Less work, however, has attempted to measure frames in thought directly, which may illuminate cognitive mechanisms that underlie framing effects. In this vein, we describe a Web experiment (n = 400) in which US political partisans reported the extent to which a “global warming” or “climate change” frame brought to mind various climate-related concepts. Although the media frequently employ them interchangeably, these frames evoked distinct patterns of cognitive accessibility across partisans: Whereas conservatives associated heat-related impacts (rising temperatures, melting ice) more strongly with “global warming” than with “climate change,” liberals associated these impacts equally with both phrases. Discussion focuses on implications for media framing of climate issues and framing theory more broadly.

Keywords:

• framing effects
• climate change
• cognitive accessibility
• media frames
• motivated reasoning

Notes

1. A Lexis-Nexis search for these phrases among the headlines of seventeen major US newspapers representing diverse political perspectives (e.g., The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal) during the period from 2007 to 2012 (following the release of Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth) revealed that both phrases appear frequently in the media, with “global warming” returning over 500 instances and “climate change” returning over 700.

2. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, “global warming” refers to the increase in global surface temperatures resulting from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, whereas “climate change” refers to various protracted changes in climate patterns more broadly (Environmental Protection Agency [EPA], 2012).

3. Numbers represent the percentage endorsing a value ≥5 on the belief scale.

4. Political ideology was distributed as: “very liberal” (15.6%), “liberal” (31.0%), “basically independent, but leaning toward liberal” (19.5%), “independent” (16.3%), “basically independent, but leaning toward conservative” (7.8%), “conservative” (8.0%), “very conservative” (1.8%). Political party affiliation was distributed as: “Democrat” (46.8%), “Republican” (11.5%), “Independent” (30.5%), “Other/None of the above” (11.3%).

5. Indeed, when we asked participants before debriefing to guess what the study was “really about,” none indicated any awareness of our research questions.

6. For example, compared to attempts at framing a given issue (e.g., gun ownership) in different sociocultural terms (as an “individual rights” vs. “public safety” issue), the type of framing examined here involves varying only a few words that are commonly treated as synonyms. As a result, we speculate that such framing may rely primarily on the activation of semantically related concepts stored in memory (e.g., “heat” in the case of “global warming”; Bargh et al., 1996; Collins & Loftus, 1975). Because the wording change is quite subtle, this framing may also invite less explicit awareness on the part of audiences and trigger less counter-argumentation, mental correction, and other types of controlled message processing (Sniderman & Theriault, 2004; Wilson & Brekke, 1994).