Framing the Lewinsky Affair: Third-Person Judgments by Scandal Frame

Recent studies have documented a “third-person effect” whereby people are found to judge others as more influenced than themselves by the mass media. Meanwhile, contemporary research on issue framing has demonstrated the powerful role of mass media in shaping people's political judgments. But are the perceptual judgments that define third-person effects sensitive to how the media frame an issue? Two studies investigated this question in the context of the Lewinsky-Clinton scandal, one in late August 1998 and the other during spring 1999. Several hundred undergraduates in each study were randomly assigned to one of two media frames. In the 1998 study, the political scandal was depicted as a matter of sexual indiscretion by the president or as legal wrongdoing; in the 1999 study, the recently concluded impeachment process was depicted as the consequence of partisanship or of Clinton's actions. The participants’ judgments of media influence on themselves and on the public were then recorded. The results show that third-person effects were sensitive to issue framing, but change occurred primarily in participants’ judgments about their own vulnerability to media influence.     

解释框架对文化混搭产品评价的影响——比较焦点和解释策略的调节效应

文化混搭产品因涉及到不同国家的文化符号的同时呈现, 可能导致母国文化的完整性与生命力受到威胁, 引发外国文化入侵母国文化的感知进而降低消费者的产品评价。本研究从文化混搭产品的营销传播视角出发, 基于前人的研究基础之上, 探讨了不同信息表述框架策略的采用会如何影响消费者的文化入侵感知进而影响他们对文化混搭产品的评价, 并重点探究了它可能存在的两个边界条件, 即消费者的比较焦点和企业的不同解释策略。两个实验的结果不仅再一次验证了前人所得出的研究结论, 即文化混搭产品采用“外国文化-母国文化”的框架策略时, 会使消费者产生外国文化改变了母国文化的感知, 导致消费者对产品的评价要显著低于采用“母国文化-外国文化”的框架策略, 其中感知文化入侵起着完全中介的作用。更重要的是, 深入揭示出上述的这种不同文化混搭框架效应只有在启动的是消费者的差异性聚焦以及企业采用的是属性解释策略时才存在, 而当启动的是消费者的相似性聚焦以及企业采用关系解释策略时, 这一效应将会消失。本研究不仅深入剖析出了引发消费者对文化混搭现象产生排斥性反应的内在机理, 拓展了前人研究结论的普适性, 也为企业的文化混搭产品的营销推广提供了有用的实践启示。     

“Time's Up!”: Framing Collective Impatience for Radical Political Change

Grievance is a prominent feature of mobilization for radical political change. Existing scholarship, however, does not pay sufficient attention to the temporal texture of grievance narratives. Temporally “flat” narratives of grievance are ill equipped to provide either the cognitive or emotional stimulus for major political reorientation. In response to this issue, the article develops the concept of collective exhaustion master frames. These are frames that narrate the aggrieved community's arrival to a threshold of collective impatience. Such narratives have two functions—to legitimize radical departures from prevailing political habits (a cognitive task) and to stimulate collective impatience with the political status quo (an emotional management task). In addition to developing the concept of exhaustion frames, the article demonstrates its empirical relevance by outlining five distinctive framing episodes, starting with the U.S. Declaration of Independence. The conclusion outlines the future directions for the study of collective impatience and points to the range of implications for political psychology and adjacent disciplines.     

The Effects of Accumulated Underaccommodation on Perceptions of Underaccommodative Communication and Speakers

This study examined the effects of repeated instances of underaccommodation (i.e., insufficiently adjusted communication) on people's perceptions and evaluations of communication and speakers. Participants (N = 179) completed a series of three map‐based tasks that required them to follow directions that contained insufficient information. Consistent with hypotheses, as underaccommodation accumulated across tasks, participants inferred less positive motives for the speaker's communication, and inferences about motive for each task contributed directly and indirectly to overall evaluations of both the speaker and their communication. These results indicate that accumulated underaccommodation is consequential, and underscore the theoretical importance of motive attributions to predicting reactions to underaccommodation.     

The Influence of Identity Salience on Framing Effectiveness: An Experiment

Efforts to influence attitudes on highly polarizing issues, such as climate change, often fail because individuals interpret political messages through the lens of their partisan identities. However, shifting the identity lens through which an individual interprets a message may result in more effective political communication. Through a preregistered survey experiment (n = 978), this study tested how priming either a partisan or a nonpartisan (parental) identity influenced the effectiveness of a climate change frame on several attitudinal outcomes. Findings suggest that identity salience—specifically partisan identity salience—can influence the effectiveness of a frame. Among Republican parents, receiving a message about the impact of climate change on future generations increased climate change concern and intended proclimate political behaviors, but this framing effect disappeared when a partisan identity was first primed. Among Democrat parents, framing had no significant effect until a partisan identity was first primed. The findings offer important insight into the role that identity salience plays in framing effectiveness and suggest that political communication on polarized issues is likely to be more effective at building bipartisan agreement when nonpartisan identities are salient.     

Friends on the Margins

In this essay, I examine Richard Miller’s exposition of political solidarity as one of the key contributions of his multifaceted argument in Friends and Other Strangers to the study of religion, ethics, and culture. Miller’s focus on culture broadens the landscape of ethical analysis in ways that illuminate how culture and cultural productions mediate and construct norms and virtues, and the complex relations between self and society. I challenge Miller’s inclination, however, to focus scholarly attention more on habituated forms of civic identity and communal solidarity rather than on disruptive potentialities and critical practices. I suggest that an engagement with social movement theory and the sociology of emotions, with their focus on semiotic analysis and social change processes and mechanisms, can greatly enrich Miller’s account of religion and ethical solidarity.