Agenda‐Setting and Priming Theories

At first glance, the concepts of priming and agenda setting appear very similar. Both are based on the assumption that news coverage in the media will impact perceptions held by the public. Both assume individuals will use the frequency of coverage in the news as cues to their perceptual formations. However, priming and agenda setting diverge in several important ways, including the ultimate outcome of individuals' exposure to the media messages. The purpose of this entry is to highlight both the similarities and differences. Agenda setting has often been described by using the quote from Bernard Cohen's The Press and Foreign Policy. Here, Cohen, explaining how the press influences the public, wrote: "It may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about" (Cohen, 1963, p. 13). An example that demonstrates this process: Let's say that the local newspaper began running a series of stories about the city's need for strict gun control laws. Members of the public see the articles and so are exposed to information about the need for gun control. The outcome of the exposure to the stories, however, does not necessarily demonstrate an influence on the public's attitude toward gun control. Instead, the media influence is that the public sees that gun control is an important issue. Two important points about this process are sometimes overlooked. First, Cohen argued that the press "may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think." Much of the time implies that the media can, at certain times, under certain circumstances, with certain people, influence what people think about issues. If individuals are uncertain about an issue or the issue is of high personal relevance, people may be more susceptible to attitude change based on media coverage. Weaver (1977) refers to uncertainty and relevance as factors in the "need for orientation," which has important implications for agenda setting as well as attitude change. Second, the Cohen quote implies that the final outcome from the agenda-setting process involves cognition: learning about the important issues of the day. This created an important paradigm shift for mass communication research. Prior to the initial agenda-setting study by McCombs and Shaw (1972), the prevailing school of thought in this field presumed limited effects of mass communication. The limited effects paradigm emerged when researchers were finding minimal media effects on voting behavior. Thus, researchers shifted from studying behavioral effects to cognitive effects. Priming, on the other hand, offers a different final outcome. Humans, priming researchers argue, are cognitive misers (Willnat, 1997)-they do not take all of their knowledge into account when facing a need for information. They create cognitive shortcuts, connecting the information need with previous stored information that is most readily available.