Media primes and their effects on bicultural individuals.

• Main Author: Chew, Han Ei.
• Other Authors: Benjamin Hill Detenber
• Format: Theses and Dissertations
• Language: English
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: DRNTU::Social sciences::Mass media::Media effects
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/42243
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Scholarly interest in priming, which refers to a particular type of short-term influence that media content can have on people's later behavior or judgment, has been emerging among communication researchers in recent years. One recent development in priming research is the study of how culture can be primed by cultural icons to activate different interpretative frames for different contexts. Substantial evidence has been found by psychologists to suggest that primes in the form of cultural icons can trigger shifts in cultural orientations in bicultural individuals. The current study extends previous research by using more quotidian media primes in the form of television commercials to establish the threshold of cultural priming. It also examines if attitudinal and perceptual dispositions can be activated by media content along with the respective cultural dispositions of independence and interdependence. Results indicate that, in contrast with previous studies, causal attribution of behavior was not affected by media priming. Some support for priming effects on perception that is consistent with existing research was found. Participants exposed to the media messages that activate a cultural orientation that is more typically Western made more references to focal objects in a subsequent recollection task of a picture while those presented media messages that activate a cultural orientation that is more typically Asian reported relatively higher scores on the interdependent self-construal measure. However, taken together, the findings suggest that media priming effects on culturally-linked perception and cognition are a fairly weak phenomenon, at least in the context of this study, given that partial support was found for only two out of the four pairs of hypotheses posed.