Keys to a Future Majority - The Agenda-Setting Effect, Priming, And Youth Voting

This is the third installment of my thesis, Keys to a Future Majority. Click here for the introduction, here for the second piece, and here for the third piece.

In my last post I looked at autobiographical and collective memory research, which demonstrated the phenomenon known as the reminiscence bump. These studies showed that the easiest memories for people to retrieve are either those that happened recently, or those that happened during the "critical period" of their development, roughly between the ages of 16 and 26. But, some of you still may be thinking- "so what that these people can remember some things easier than others? What does this have to do with politics and Music for America"

Well, it has a lot to do with politics, and in order to explain why I'm going to turn to media effects research and decision-making theories.

The "Agenda-Setting Effect" and Priming

Every day tens-of-millions of Americans turn to some form of news to find out what's going on in the world. Naturally, many social scientists have asked the question "What effect does watching the news have on those who watch it" Media researchers have come to find that the most powerful media effect is not the ability to tell you what to think, but rather what to think about. In order to clear up what is meant by this statement I'll turn to a series of experiments which looked at what effect the news has on us. These experiments were conducted mainly by Shanto Iyengar, who is currently the director of Stanford University's Political Communications Lab.

In these experiments Iyengar and his colleagues would bring people into a lab, which was usually made to look and feel like a normal living room, and have them watch the nightly news. The experiments were carried out using one of two methods.
In the first method, Iyengar forced the subject to view, in a single sitting, a collection of different news stories that weren't necessarily from the same period of time. Subjects were told that the news they were being shown represented a sample of the current news. At the end of the viewing the subjects were asked to list which issues were the most pressing and they were also asked to evaluate how good of a job the President of the United States was doing.

Iyengar's second method had subjects watch the news at the lab for three to five days in a row. At the end of each day they answered similar questions as those who participated in the first experiment. What the subjects did not know was the researchers had slightly altered the news that half of them watched, discreetly inserting stories which had to do with some specific issue. The researchers might insert stories about the environment, civil rights issues, crime, or any other issue which the experimenters chose. This method was considered more naturalistic, while the first was considered more controlled, however both methods produced similar results.

What Iyengar found throughout his experiments were two significant effects, which are known as the agenda-setting effect and priming. The agenda-setting effect is also sometimes referred to as ‘framing', however I won't use the term here however so as not to confuse the agenda-setting effect with the notion of framing put forth by people such as the linguist George Lakoff. While "lakoffian" framing focuses on the images that certain words or phrases bring to mind, the agenda-setting effect refers to the ability of the media to affect which issues that a person sees as most important. If Iyengar and his colleagues had inserted stories about the environment, for example, the subjects would be much more likely to give the environment as the most pressing political issue of the day. This is what is meant by the news being able to tell you "what to think about." If you want to test out this theory on your own, try listening to the conversations that your friends or family have and ask yourself this question: how many of the events that your family or friends are talking about relate to something going on in the news at that moment? I'm sure you'll find that most of it will have to do with something that the media chose to highlight in the past few days.

Not everyone is affected equally by the agenda-setting effect. People belonging to social groups which were directly affected by the issue that Iyengar chose to insert would give that issue as the most important faster than people who didn't belong to the affected group. For example, if Iyengar highlighted the issue of discrimination, African-Americans would mention discrimination after one session while Whites start to exhibit the agenda-setting effect after two or three sessions.

But what effect does this have on our political beliefs and behaviors? Iyengar and his colleagues found that the issues they chose to highlight had a profound effect on their subject's evaluations of the president and the political parties. This effect is known as priming, and it refers to the abilities of the agenda-setting effect of the news to affect subsequent evaluations of the President and the political parties. Priming in turn affects the chances that a person would vote for the President or his party in the next election. So, if the subjects who were shown news dealing with environmental issues, and the President or his party were seen as weak on environmental issues, then they would be more likely to view the President in a poorer light. As a consequence these subjects would be less likely to vote for the President or his party if there was an election at the time of the priming.

But why does this happen? Well, when people make complex decisions, like evaluating the president, they don't scan through their memory for all of the information that they possess. Instead, people tend to rely on shortcuts to decisions known as heuristics. We use all sorts of heuristics in our daily lives, usually referring to them as "rules of thumb." In general these rules of thumb are beneficial. Imagine if you had to search through every memory that you posses each and every time you had to make a decision, you'd be paralyzed by indecisiveness. But while some heuristics are beneficial, some can cause errors of judgment and lead to other problems; these are known in psychology as cognitive biases. One prominent type of heuristic is the representative heuristic, which leads to, amongst other things, stereotyping of different social groups. Another prominent political heuristic, which is often a cognitive bias, is party identification, meaning that many people don't think about why they vote for a certain candidate. Instead, they just assume that the candidate from their preferred party supports their position on the issue or is the best person for the job. This would help to explain why a survey done before the last election found that many Republicans didn't know where President Bush stood on a number of key foreign policy issues.

The heuristic that is manipulated by the agenda-setting effect is one of the oldest known and well documented and is known as the availability heuristic. Psychologists have found that people base their decisions on what information comes to mind most easily, meaning that whatever affects the accessibility of your memories affects the decisions that you will make. Because the media has a profound effect on which information will come to mind with the greatest ease, it also has a large effect on how we make our political decisions.

But is the media the only thing that affects which memories are easiest to access? Let's take a look again at the chart of the reminiscence bump from last week.

(Source: Rybash, J.R. & Monaghan, B. E., Episodic and semantic contributions to older adults' autobiographical recall, The Journal of General Psychology; Jan 1999)

As you can see, for older people there are two areas of their memory which are most easily accessed, those that are most recent and those that are from the reminiscence bump period of life. So while the media certainly have significant effects on what memories are most easily accessed by older viewers, so do those memories from their reminiscence bump period. I would guess that the two may combine to have an even stronger effect.

This is why I thought that the 2004 election would revolve around Vietnam. First, we have a war in Iraq and as a result I thought that there would be large portions of the news devoted to the war in Iraq. This would bring the more general category of war into the minds of the American public, which would bring the Vietnam War to the fore of the minds of the "Vietnam Generation." (This is still speculation, since as I noted in my first essay I abandoned my proposed research in this area in favor of working with Music for America. However, I think that most of the reasoning here could be experimentally validated).

But while I figured that simply reporting on the Iraq War would bring Vietnam to the minds of the Vietnam Generation, I also thought that comparisons of the Iraq war with the Vietnam War would be made in the media, since the creators and editors of the media are primarily from that generation. This, I thought, would create an amplification effect, since news viewers would probably make their own internal comparisons, plus the media would make direct comparisons. And thus I thought that in the end, the election would be decided by the Vietnam War, more than by the Iraq War.

At first I thought that these memories would increase support for John Kerry, but when I started to research the opinions of Americans at the time I realized that this was probably not the case. I am going to have to save a deeper analysis of opinions of the Vietnam Generation towards that war for later. For now I will say that despite the fact that a majority of people believe that the Vietnam War was a mistake, they have differing reasons for believing so, and blame different groups or events for the war's failure. In my eyes the failure to understand and directly address the complex emotions and memories of the Vietnam Generation led to Kerry's losses amongst that age group, for example amongst the so-called "security moms."

Youth Voting

By now you might be wondering: "What does this have to do with Music for America ?" Actually it has a lot to do with MfA, and this research is what led me to believe that MfA was performing some of the most important functions during the last election.

Here's why:

First of all, you can see that the most important demographic for political groups and parties to communicate with are those in their critical period. This is because the memories and behaviors of this period of life affect the opinions and behaviors of people for the rest of their lives. Focusing on younger voters is therefore a double investment. Getting youth to support an issue, candidate, or party when they are young increases the possibility that that issue, candidate or party will win the day in a current election. But, it also helps to ensure that the person will support that issue, candidate, or party for the remainder of their life.
Because the reminiscence bump forms over a span of 10+ years, we can see that it is important to engage young people over a long period of time. Music for America seemed to have a model of sustainable engagement. First of all, by working together with bands and venues MfA held the potential to continue to communicate with young people even when an election wasn't approaching. Along with this, MfA volunteers got to see their favorite bands for free, and sometimes even got to meet their favorite musicians, which would hopefully help to keep them politically interested, if not active, after the election. Instead of focusing on political candidates or parties, MfA focused on issues, and as I liked to tell the kids at the shows, these issues aren't going to be solved in a single election, even if the better candidate wins.

Since the media have such profound affects upon the things that we see as important, it is imperative that those who want to build a future majority help to set the political agenda of young people, pushing the issues that effect our generation to the fore of their thoughts. It's important to note that our perceptions of each party have not been completely formed until we are 30, and so while the priming effect might be predictable once we reach an older age, when we are younger there is still the possibility that we can change how each party is seen in relation to each issue.

Music for America also seemed able to overcome some of the media obstacles standing in the way of communicating effectively with young people. First of all, MfA had access to large numbers of young people (in the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands). If MfA could get their attention and motivate them to visit the website then there was the possibility of bypassing the extremely expensive broadcast channels of communication. In a future post, when I discuss persuasion, I'll come back to the topics of attention and motivation.

Because MfA was created and run by young people it held the possibility of speaking to other young people about politics in their language. This is extremely important since, to a large degree, those in the mainstream media talk to young people from the perspective of an older generation. As the collective memory studies showed (and as common sense dictates) people remember things in relation to their notion of self, and so it's imperative that communications aimed towards youth speak to them from their own perspective.

But possibly the largest obstacle created by the media that I felt Music for America could overcome was the unidirectional communication flow information of the broadcast and print media. On the one hand this meant giving visitors to Music for America's site the ability to self-select what information they wanted to see/read/hear/watch. However, I also felt that MfA's outreach efforts could enable progressives to collect data on the opinions of our generation. Since our youth dominates our memories when we are older it's imperative to understand the opinions of young people, and especially the movements of opinion through time.

And so with thoughts of setting the agenda for my generation, and hopes of figuring out what the rest of the kids out there were thinking, I came onto Music for America's forums. Soon, however, I would be convinced that I had misunderstood the power of the internet and the nature of what was going down with our generation.